Surveying Work Quotes

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Closed door means knock," Elena said to Clay, shooing him out. You've been in here for two hours," he said. "She can't need that much work." He frowned as he examined my outfit. "What the hell is she? A tree?" "A dryad," Elena said, cuffing him in the arm. "Oh, my god," Jamie said, surveying my outfit. "We forgot the bag!" "Bag?" Clay said. "What does a dryad need with-" "An evening bag," Cassandra said. "A purse." "She's got a purse. It's right there on the bed." "That's a day purse," Cassandra snapped. "What, do they expire when the sun goes down?
Kelley Armstrong (Industrial Magic (Women of the Otherworld, #4))
I don’t mind being lord of all I survey but I don’t want to have to work at it. It just wouldn’t be practical.
Katherine Dunn (Geek Love)
Lymond surveyed the grinning audience with an air of gentle discovery. “Is there no work to be done? Or perhaps it’s a holiday?
Dorothy Dunnett (The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1))
The gender pay gap in Korea is the highest among the OECD countries. According to 2014 data, women working in Korea earn only 63 percent of what men earn; the OECD average percentage is 84.13 Korea was also ranked as the worst country in which to be a working woman, receiving the lowest scores among the nations surveyed on the glass-ceiling index by the British magazine The Economist.14 8 “Repeated Protests against Tuition Increase,” Yonhap News, April 6, 2011.
Cho Nam-Joo (Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982)
We were in the middle of a game of cards when I noticed a figure out of the corner of my eye. It was Maxon, standing at the open door, looking amused. As our eyes met, I could see that his expression was clearly asking what in the world I was doing. I stood, smiling, and walked over to him. "Oh, sweet Lord," Anne muttered as she realized the prince was at the door. She immediately swept the cards into a sewing basket and stood, Mary and Lucy following suit. "Ladies," Maxon said. "Your Majesty," she said with a curtsy. "Such an honor, sir." "For me as well," he answered with a smile. The maids looked back and forth to one another, flattered. We were all silent for a moment, not quite sure what to do. Mary suddenly piped up. "We were just leaving." "Yes! That's right," Lucy added. "We were-uh-just..." She looked to Anne for help. "Going to finish Lady America's dress for Friday," Anna concluded. "That's right," Mary said. "Only two days left. They slowly circled us to get out of the room, huge smiles plastered on their faces. "Wouldn't want to keep you from your work," Maxon said, following them with his eyes, completely fascinated with their behavior. Once in the hall, they gave awkwardly mistimed curtsies and walked away at a feverish pace. Immediately after they rounded the corner, Lucy's giggles echoed down the corridor, followed by Anne's intense hushing. "Quite a group you have," Maxon said, walking into my room, surveying the space. "They keep me on my toes," I answered with a smile. "It's clear they have affection for you. That's hard to find." He stopped looking at my room and faced me. "This isn't what I imagined your room would look like." I raised an arm and let it fall. "It's not really my room, is it? It belongs to you, and I just happen to be borrowing it.
Kiera Cass (The Selection (The Selection, #1))
Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.
Andrea Dworkin (Right-Wing Women)
In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school. In one experiment in Milwaukee, for example, 8,000 youth...were asked if they would return full-time to school if they were paid about the same wages as they earned at work; only 16 said they would.
John Taylor Gatto (The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling)
Never have I thought so much, never have I realised my own existence so much, been so much alive, been so much myself ... as in those journeys which I have made alone and afoot. Walking has something in it which animates and heightens my ideas: I can scarcely think when I stay in one place ; my body must be set a-going if my mind is to work. The sight of the country, the succession of beautiful scenes ... releases my soul, gives me greater courage of thought, throws me as it were into the midst of the immensity of the objects of Nature ... my heart, surveying one object after another, unites itself, identifies itself with those in sympathy with it, surrounds itself with delightful images, intoxicates itself with emotions the most exquisite.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Confessions)
One morning I fell to sketching a face: what sort of a face it was to be, I did not care or know. I took a soft black pencil, gave it a broad point, and worked away. Soon I had traced on the paper a broad and prominent forehead and a square lower outline of visage: that contour gave me pleasure; my fingers proceeded actively to fill it with features. Strongly-marked horizontal eyebrows must be traced under that brow; then followed, naturally, a well-defined nose, with a straight ridge and full nostrils; then a flexible-looking mouth, by no means narrow; then a firm chin, with a decided cleft down the middle of it: of course, some black whiskers were wanted, and some jetty hair, tufted on the temples, and waved above the forehead. Now for the eyes: I had left them to the last, because they required the most careful working. I drew them large; I shaped them well: the eyelashes I traced long and sombre; the irids lustrous and large. "Good! but not quite the thing," I thought, as I surveyed the effect: "they want more force and spirit;" and I wrought the shades blacker, that the lights might flash more brilliantly--a happy touch or two secured success. There, I had a friend's face under my gaze; and what did it signify that those young ladies turned their backs on me? I looked at it; I smiled at the speaking likeness: I was absorbed and content. Is that a portrait of some one you know?" asked Eliza, who had approached me unnoticed. I responded that it was merely a fancy head, and hurried it beneath the other sheets. Of course, I lied: it was, in fact, a very faithful representation of Mr. Rochester. But what was that to her, or to any one but myself? Georgiana also advanced to look. The other drawings pleased her much, but she called that 'an ugly man.
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
Just as ants do when their nest is disturbed, we return, survey the damage, and then without hesitation immediately get to work rebuilding.
Camron Wright (The Rent Collector)
But the survey also indicated that men tended to place greater value on attaining a high position and earning a high salary, whereas women placed a higher value on the actual experience of work.
Sally Helgesen (How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job)
My yogurt was nestled into a bag, waiting to turn into aushak, and all around us were sausages and pastry, lollipops and spices, chicken and cheese. Any world that contained all this, I thought surveying our loot, was a very fine place. I felt reinvigorated, alive, optimistic. The though of getting back to work suddenly seemed like fun.
Ruth Reichl (Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise)
The sciences have two extremities which meet. The first is the ignorance in which men find themselves at birth. The second is that attained by great souls. They have surveyed whatever man can know, find that they know all, meet in that same ignorance whence they started. It is a clever ignorance, which knows itself. Those among them who, having emerged from the first ignorance, have been unable to achieve the other & have some smattering of this self-satisfied knowledge, pose as experts. The latter do not disturb people, are no more mistaken in their judgments on everything than others. The masses, the skilled, make up the retinue of a nation. The others, who respect it, are equally respected by it.
Comte de Lautréamont (Maldoror and the Complete Works)
Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.
Samuel Johnson (Preface to Shakespeare)
After a time, my hand had become as skilled as my eyes. So if I was drawing a very fine tree, it felt as if my hand was moving without me directly it. As I watched the pencil race across the page, I would look on it in amazement, as if the drawing were the proof of another presence, as if someone else had taken up residence in my body. As I marveled at his work aspiring to become his equal, another part of my brain was busy inspecting the curves of the branches, the placement of mountains, the composition as a whole, reflecting that I had created this scene on a blank piece of paper. My mind was at the tip of my pen, acting before I could think; at the same time it could survey what I had already done. This second line of perception, this ability to analyse my progress, was the pleasure this small artist felt when he looked at the discovery of his courage and freedom. To step outside myself , to know the second person who had taken up residence inside me, was to retrace the dividing line that appeared as my pencil slipped across the paper, like a boy sledding in the snow.
Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul: Memories and the City)
Then there’s the issue of cognitive capacity. Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities. Performance psychologists have extensively studied how much such efforts can be sustained by an individual in a given day.* In their seminal paper on deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson and his collaborators survey these studies. They note that for someone new to such practice (citing, in particular, a child in the early stages of developing an expert-level skill), an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
A perfect Judge will read each work of Wit With the same spirit that its author writ; Survey the WHOLE, nor seek slight faults to find Where nature moves, and rapture warms the mind; .... In wit, as nature, what effects our hearts Is not th'exactness of peculiar parts; 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, But the joint force and full result of all.
Alexander Pope (An Essay On Criticism)
I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey Maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina.
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
If you want to know the truth about what you’ve built, you have to ship it. You can test, you can brainstorm, you can argue, you can survey, but only shipping will tell you whether you’re going to sink or swim.
Jason Fried (It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work)
I found it odd that the transport was less interested in Sanctuary Moon, which took place on a colony, than Worldhoppers, which was about the crew of a large exploration ship. You’d think it would be too much like work—I avoided serials about survey teams and mining installations—but maybe familiar things were easier for
Martha Wells (Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2))
I was near-delirious. Gazing up at the pillared skyline, I knew that I was surveying a tremendous work of man. Buying myself a drink in the smaller warrens below, in all their ethnic variety (and willingness to keep odd and late hours, and provide plentiful ice cubes, and free matchbooks in contrast to English parsimony in these matters), I felt the same thing in a different way. The balance between the macro and the micro, the heroic scale and the human scale, has never since ceased to fascinate and charm me. Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think—made me think for many years—that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
We found in surveys of Agile teams that some 80 percent to 90 percent of Agile teams perceive tension between the way the Agile team is run and the way the whole organization is run. In half of those cases, the tension was “serious.
Stephen Denning (The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done)
Our research inside companies revealed that the best way to motivate people, day in and day out, is by facilitating progress—even small wins. But the managers in our survey ranked “supporting progress” dead last as a work motivator.3
Teresa Amabile (The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work)
Anger and tears create the space for the work of the Spirit. They are the groaning of the Spirit for renewal or creation and an expression of compassion thus revealing a deep spiritual well. To fear our tears or to suppress our anger is to block the power of the spirit springing forth from within our spiritual wells to resist death and to sustain and renew life.
Elizabeth Conde-Frazier (Latina Evangélicas: A Theological Survey from the Margins)
Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it's a given the role for which you're hiring is going to change. Yesterday's widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise that is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise. A smart generalist doesn't have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.
Eric Schmidt (How Google Works)
We Americans often say that marriage is hard work. I'm not sure that the Hmong would understand this notion. Life is hard work, of course, and work is very hard work -- I'm quite certain they would agree with those statements - but how does marriage become hard work? Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life's expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work. A recent survey of young American women found that what women are seeking these days in a husband - more than anything else - is a man who will "inspire" them, which is, by any measure, a tall order. As a point of comparison, young women of the same age, surveyed back in the 1920s, were more likely to choose a partner based on qualities such as "decency" or "honesty," or his ability to provide for a family. But that's not enough anymore. Now we want to be INSPIRED by our spouses! Daily! Step to it, honey!
Elizabeth Gilbert (Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage)
The psychologists Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir offered college students a five-dollar reward for filling out a survey. When given a five-day deadline, 66% of the students completed the survey and claimed their rewards. When given no deadline, only 25% ever collected their money.
Chip Heath (Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work)
Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. My own analysis using 2005 survey data from Syracuse University shows that about 90 percent of conservatives agree that “While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.” Liberals — even upper-income liberals — are a third less likely to say this.
Arthur C. Brooks
Dobby would never be able to tell them who had sent him to the cellar, but Harry knew what he had seen. A piercing blue eye had looked out of the mirror fragment, and then help had come. Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it. Harry dried his hands, impervious to the beauty of the scene outside the window and to the murmuring of the others in the sitting room. He looked out over the ocean and felt closer, this dawn, than ever before, closer to the heart of it all. And still his scar prickled, and he knew that Voldemort was getting there too. Harry understood and yet did not understand. His instinct was telling him one thing, his brain quite another. The Dumbledore in Harry’s head smiled, surveying Harry over the tips of his fingers, pressed together as if in prayer. You gave Ron the Deluminator. You understood him…You gave him a way back… And you understood Wormtail too…You knew there was a bit of regret there, somewhere… And if you knew them…What did you know about me, Dumbledore? Am I meant to know, but not to seek? Did you know how hard I’d find that? Is that why you made it this difficult? So I’d have time to work that out?
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7))
A memory is least accurate when most reflected upon, and most accurate when least pondered. Together, those two facts make eyewitness testimony basically worthless. This isn’t what most people believe. Psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris published a study in 2011 revealing that 63 percent of those surveyed in the United States believe memory works like a video camera, and another 48 percent believe memories are permanent. An additional 37 percent said that eyewitness testimony was reliable enough to be the only evidence necessary to convict someone accused of a crime. Those are seriously shocking facts to a psychologist or a neuroscientist, because none of those things is true. You don’t record everything you see, nor do you notice everything that comes into your mind. The only things that make it past the ears and eyes are those things to which you attend. Memories are not recordings. The moment your first kiss was over, the memory of it began to decay. Each time you recall it, the event is reformed in your mind anew and differently, influenced by your current condition and by all the wisdom you’ve acquired since and all the erroneous details you’ve added.
David McRaney (You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself)
But she’d spared him. She’d used all her deadly skills to save him instead. She’d spit on the memory of David and her baby to give Beckett a get-out-of-jail-free card. She surveyed her work in the Hummer’s headlights. Perfect. She’d done it so many times now it was second nature. Now I’m just a murderer, not an avenger. I’m just like him.
Debra Anastasia (Poughkeepsie (Poughkeepsie Brotherhood, #1))
Self proclamation of authoritative titles is a common phenomenon among religious and/or occult sect leaders. A cursory survey of this primarily 20th century phenomenon will instantly reveal a multitude of self-declared Masters, High Priests, gurus, Ipsissimi, Bhaghwani, etc.. I am pleased that I cannot count myself among such types. Legitimate religious teachers and scholars know that a genuine spiritual leader is one whose calling to lead is first noticed by those outside of him or herself based on certain qualities, abilities, and actions and then must subsequently be accepted by the individual in question as his or her destiny. This contrasts with those whose will to lead is born simply out of the mundane wish to be a leader. In such cases the goal being to reap the rewards a title brings without the hard work and the innate, manifest qualities which validate the position; in short what might be considered a 'false prophet'." --“From the Eye of the Storm” (Zeena's column for the SLM) Volume II – Winter Issue (2003): “One Year Later...
Zeena Schreck (Demons of the Flesh: The Complete Guide to Left Hand Path Sex Magic)
We can no longer afford to ignore the work of others and to plan our missions as though other missions did not exist.
Roland Allen (Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions)
Surveys consistently say that Americans end up in jobs they don’t love or even like. Why do you think so many people have difficulty finding or creating satisfying employment?
Civitelli, Janet Scarborough (Help Me Find a Career: Strategies to Choose Work You Will Love)
you can brainstorm, you can argue, you can survey, but only shipping will tell you whether you’re going to sink or swim.
Jason Fried (It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work)
Darwin, with his Origin of Species, his theories about Natural Selection, the Survival of the Fittest, and the influence of environment, shed a flood of light upon the great problems of plant and animal life. These things had been guessed, prophesied, asserted, hinted by many others, but Darwin, with infinite patience, with perfect care and candor, found the facts, fulfilled the prophecies, and demonstrated the truth of the guesses, hints and assertions. He was, in my judgment, the keenest observer, the best judge of the meaning and value of a fact, the greatest Naturalist the world has produced. The theological view began to look small and mean. Spencer gave his theory of evolution and sustained it by countless facts. He stood at a great height, and with the eyes of a philosopher, a profound thinker, surveyed the world. He has influenced the thought of the wisest. Theology looked more absurd than ever. Huxley entered the lists for Darwin. No man ever had a sharper sword -- a better shield. He challenged the world. The great theologians and the small scientists -- those who had more courage than sense, accepted the challenge. Their poor bodies were carried away by their friends. Huxley had intelligence, industry, genius, and the courage to express his thought. He was absolutely loyal to what he thought was truth. Without prejudice and without fear, he followed the footsteps of life from the lowest to the highest forms. Theology looked smaller still. Haeckel began at the simplest cell, went from change to change -- from form to form -- followed the line of development, the path of life, until he reached the human race. It was all natural. There had been no interference from without. I read the works of these great men -- of many others – and became convinced that they were right, and that all the theologians -- all the believers in "special creation" were absolutely wrong. The Garden of Eden faded away, Adam and Eve fell back to dust, the snake crawled into the grass, and Jehovah became a miserable myth.
Robert G. Ingersoll
A recent international Gallup survey of more than two hundred thousand workers in 150 countries reported that 85 percent were either “not engaged” with their work or “actively disengaged.” In
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey Maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina. In
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
What are they doing, examining last month's costs with a microscope when they should be surveying the horizon with a telescope? [Acerbic comment about directors of Brunner Mond, where he worked.]
Francis Arthur Freeth
Time magazine found in a 2000 survey that 19 percent of Americans thought they were in the top 1 percent of wage-earners, and another 20 percent expected to be in the future. “So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top i percent, he was taking a direct shot at them,” wrote David Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.3
David K. Shipler (The Working Poor: Invisible in America)
According to a 2015 survey of thousands of US fast-food workers by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, 79 percent had been burned on the job in the previous year—most more than once.
Emily Guendelsberger (On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane)
His book Witchcraft and the Shamanic Journey (formerly North Star Road) was one of the first works presented to mainstream pagan practitioners that overtly demonstrates the similarities between witchcraft and shamanism through a survey of cultures as diverse as the Norse and the Mayan. He is also responsible for bringing greater awareness to Slavic magick and shamanism through his book Slavic Sorcery. Two
Christopher Penczak (The Temple of Shamanic Witchcraft: Shadows, Spirits and the Healing Journey (Temple of Witchcraft, #3))
According to a recent survey by the National Association of Church Business Administration, the average pastor in 2012 makes an annual salary of $28,000. One in five has to work a second job to support his family.
Samuel R. Chand (Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth)
They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don't want to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America's happy, faceless marketplace; and we're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we're bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives-- although that's what we tell ourselves-- but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. Don't know who I am? I'm an individual!
Barack Obama
Even the most complex math can be broken into a sequence of trivial steps. Each of these slaves has been trained to complete specific equations in an assembly-line fashion. When taken together, this collective human mind is capable of remarkable feats." Holtzman surveyed the room as if he expected his solvers to give him a resounding cheer. Instead, they studied their work with heavy-lidded eyes, moving through equation after equation with no comprehension of reasons or larger pictures.
Brian Herbert
There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things; for then he will be able to dig out the veins easily and advantageously, and to obtain more abundant results from his mining. Secondly there is Medicine, that he may be able to look after his diggers and other workman ... Thirdly follows astronomy, that he may know the divisions of the heavens and from them judge the directions of the veins. Fourthly, there is the science of Surveying that he may be able to estimate how deep a shaft should be sunk ... Fifthly, his knowledge of Arithmetical Science should be such that he may calculate the cost to be incurred in the machinery and the working of the mine. Sixthly, his learning must comprise Architecture, that he himself may construct the various machines and timber work required underground ... Next, he must have knowledge of Drawing, that he can draw plans of his machinery. Lastly, there is the Law, especially that dealing with metals, that he may claim his own rights, that he may undertake the duty of giving others his opinion on legal matters, that he may not take another man's property and so make trouble for himself, and that he may fulfil his obligations to others according to the law.
Georgius Agricola (DE RE METALLICA [TRANSLATED FROM THE FIRST LATIN EDITION OF 1556])
We have already shown by references to the contemporary drama that the plea of custom is not sufficient to explain Shakespeare’s attitude to the lower classes, but if we widen our survey to the entire field of English letters in his day, we shall see that he was running counter to all the best traditions of our literature. From the time of Piers Plowman down, the peasant had stood high with the great writers of poetry and prose alike. Chaucer’s famous circle of story-tellers at the Tabard Inn in Southwark was eminently democratic.
William Shakespeare (Complete Works of William Shakespeare)
Russell was a gifted expositor. An early work of his had explained the work of Leibnitz, whom he always revered.6 His brilliant survey, A History of Western Philosophy (1946), is the ablest thing of its kind ever written and was deservedly a best-seller all over the world.
Paul Johnson (Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity)
A character like that," he said to himself—"a real little passionate force to see at play is the finest thing in nature. It's finer than the finest work of art—than a Greek bas-relief, than a great Titian, than a Gothic cathedral. It's very pleasant to be so well treated where one had least looked for it. I had never been more blue, more bored, than for a week before she came; I had never expected less that anything pleasant would happen. Suddenly I receive a Titian, by the post, to hang on my wall—a Greek bas-relief to stick over my chimney-piece. The key of a beautiful edifice is thrust into my hand, and I'm told to walk in and admire. My poor boy, you've been sadly ungrateful, and now you had better keep very quiet and never grumble again." The sentiment of these reflexions was very just; but it was not exactly true that Ralph Touchett had had a key put into his hand. His cousin was a very brilliant girl, who would take, as he said, a good deal of knowing; but she needed the knowing, and his attitude with regard to her, though it was contemplative and critical, was not judicial. He surveyed the edifice from the outside and admired it greatly; he looked in at the windows and received an impression of proportions equally fair. But he felt that he saw it only by glimpses and that he had not yet stood under the roof. The door was fastened, and though he had keys in his pocket he had a conviction that none of them would fit. She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature; but what was she going to do with herself? This question was irregular, for with most women one had no occasion to ask it. Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny. Isabel's originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own. "Whenever she executes them," said Ralph, "may I be there to see!
Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)
It’s not a lack of confidence in oneself preventing people from going after jobs where they don’t meet all of the qualifications, but a lack of confidence in other people’s abilities to view them as capable of doing the job, and therefore hiring them,” said the leadership expert, who had surveyed one thousand people to come to this conclusion. “The main barrier is not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception of what is a real requirement or rule, of how processes like these truly work, and this is especially a problem for women.
Alexandra Chang (Days of Distraction)
Millennial guys seemed, to the sociologists and anthropologists who studied them, to have attitudes toward women that portended a new era of equity—especially at work. But the reality was, indeed, far more complicated. Later surveys and studies would suggest that Millennial men as a whole turned out to be as “traditional,” and even less egalitarian, in their attitudes towards gender as their fathers—which made experts eventually posit that growing up with fathers impacted by gender masculinity crisis made them more, not less, resistant to gender equality.
Thomas Page McBee (Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man)
As I was editing this chapter, a survey of more than thirty-five hundred Australian surgeons revealed a culture rife with bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment, against women especially (although men weren’t untouched either). To give you a flavor of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility toward the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”68 I came back to this chapter on the very day that news broke in the state of Victoria, Australia, where I live, of a Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission report revealing that sexual discrimination and harassment is also shockingly prevalent in the Victorian Police, which unlawfully failed to provide an equal and safe working environment.69 I understand that attempts to identify the psychological factors that underlie sex inequalities in the workplace are well-meaning. And, of course, we shouldn’t shy away from naming (supposedly) politically unpalatable causes of those inequalities. But when you consider the women who enter and persist in highly competitive and risky occupations like surgery and policing—despite the odds stacked against them by largely unfettered sex discrimination and harassment—casual scholarly suggestions that women are relatively few in number, particularly in the higher echelons, because they’re less geared to compete in the workplace, start to seem almost offensive. Testosterone
Cordelia Fine (Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society)
Let no one take the limited, narrow position that any of the works of man can help in the least possible way to liquidate the debt of his transgression. This is a fatal deception. If you would understand it, you must cease haggling over your pet ideas, and with humble hears survey the atonement. This matter is so dimly comprehended that thousands upon thousands claiming to be sons of God are children of the wicked one, because they will depend on their own works. God always demanded good works, the law demands it, but because man placed himself in sin where his good works were valueless, Jesus' righteousness alone can avail. Christ is able to save to the uttermost because He ever liveth to make intercession for us. All man can possibly do toward his own salvation is to accept the invitation, "Whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.
Ellen Gould White (Notebook Leaflets)
when a husband and wife both are employed full-time, the mother does 40 percent more child care and about 30 percent more housework than the father.1 A 2009 survey found that only 9 percent of people in dual-earner marriages said that they shared housework, child care, and breadwinning evenly.
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
Having had some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a nobleman of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina.
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
Silver mining in the United States didn’t start, like hard-core, until the mid-1850s,” Louis said. “And only really got big when the Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859 in California.” “It was bad work. Dangerous. Like any mining. But silver also lets out fumes when it’s mined. Even Pliny the Elder wrote about how harmful the fumes were, especially to animals. You know Pliny the Elder?” “The problem with the silver fumes,” Louis continued, “is that, over time, they gave the miners delusions. Bad enough that they had to stop mining. Their health deteriorated. And a bunch of them even died.” Hard to make fun of something like that, so Pepper didn’t. “Do you know what people would say, in these mining towns, when they saw one of these miners falling apart? Walking through town muttering and swinging at phantoms? They said the Devil in Silver got them. It became shorthand. Like someone might say, ‘What happened to Mike?’ And the answer was always the same. ‘The Devil in Silver got him.’ ” Louis sat straight and crossed his arms and surveyed the table. “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?” “You’re saying we’re just making this thing up,” Pepper said quietly. Louis seemed disappointed. He dropped his hands into his lap and folded them there. He looked at his sister and Pepper. He turned his head to take in the other patients gathered with their family members there in the hospital. “I’m saying they were dying,” Louis said. “They definitely weren’t making that up. But it wasn’t a monster that was killing them. It was the mine.
Victor LaValle (The Devil in Silver)
One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation
Amy Chua (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)
No matter what your reason for wanting to start your own business, developing the foundation is the same. Laying a solid foundation for you business will provide you with a road map to follow as you build your business. As you work through the Start a Business Step-by-Step Workbook you will define the company’s mission, decide what business entity is right for your business, name your business, determine the pricing for your products or services, formulate your financial projections, define your competitors, survey consumers regarding your products or services, determine the marketing methods right for your business and more.
Jeanne A. Estes (Start a Business Step-by-Step Workbook)
SurveyUSA conducted a poll for several Kentucky media outlets that shows Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) at 46 percent and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) at 44 percent. A month ago, the same pollster working for the same outlets suggested that McConnell was up by four points. Hence, raised eyebrows. - Philip Bump from the Fix
Anonymous
It’s one thing building a cloister to reflect the 768 of the numerological Bismillah, it’s another planning a giant alphabet out of an entire city before you’ve even built your first mosque.’ ‘It is, but remember, Sinan was chief architect and city planner at the time of the conquest of Cairo. He practised on that city; demolishing and building where he liked. I have no doubt that he was already forming the idea of a sacred geometry. His first building as Architect of the Abode of Felicity was the Haseki Hürrem Mosque for the Kadin Roxelana. Not his greatest work by any means, and he was working from existing designs, but it was identifiable as his first mature work. There’s a story in his autobiography Tezkiretül Bünyan that while he was surveying the site he noticed that children were pulling live fish from a grating in the street. When he went to investigate he discovered an entire Roman cistern down there. Perhaps it was this that inspired him to realize his vision. Hidden water. The never-ceasing stream of Hurufism.
Ian McDonald (The Dervish House)
When we imagine Jesus’ teaching in his own time and place, W ca we cannot use profiles of teachers from our own world to understand the nature of his work. Our culture is heir to the Greek tradition, where abstract reasoning and verbal prowess are the measure of the teacher. Jesus’ world was different. He communicated through word pictures, dramatic actions, metaphors, and stories. Rather than lecture about religious corruption, Jesus refers to the Pharisees as “whitewashed tombs.” Rather than outline the failings of the temple, he curses a fig tree. This means that we should think of Jesus as a “metaphorical theologian” for whom drama, humor, and storytelling were all a part of his method.
Gary M. Burge (The New Testament in Antiquity: A Survey of the New Testament within Its Cultural Context)
Optimists Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything. If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of course, the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality. Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders—not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than midlevel managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Most of all I enjoy central-heating control rooms, where men with higher education, chained to their jobs like dogs to their kennels, write the history of their times as a sort of sociological survey and where I learned how the fourth estate was depopulated and the proletariat went from base to superstructure and how the university-trained elite now carries on its work.
Bohumil Hrabal (Too Loud a Solitude)
He surveyed what remained of his crew. Rotty still hovered by the wreckage of the longboat. Jesper sat with elbows on knees, head in hands, Wylan beside him wearing the face of a near-stranger; Matthias stood gazing across the water in the direction of Hellgate like a stone sentinel. If Kaz was their leader, then Inej had been their lodestone, pulling them together when they seemed most likely to drift apart. Nina had disguised Kaz’s crow-and-cup tattoo before they’d entered the Ice Court, but he hadn’t let her near the R on his bicep. Now he touched his gloved fingers to where the sleeve of his coat covered that mark. Without meaning to, he’d let Kaz Rietveld return. He didn’t know if it had begun with Inej’s injury or that hideous ride in the prison wagon, but somehow he’d let it happen and it had cost him dearly. That didn’t mean he was going to let himself be bested by some thieving merch. Kaz looked south toward Ketterdam’s harbors. The beginnings of an idea scratched at the back of his skull, an itch, the barest inkling. It wasn’t a plan, but it might be the start of one. He could see the shape it would take—impossible, absurd, and requiring a serious chunk of cash. “Scheming face,” murmured Jesper. “Definitely,” agreed Wylan. Matthias folded his arms. “Digging in your bag of tricks, demjin?” Kaz flexed his fingers in his gloves. How did you survive the Barrel? When they took everything from you, you found a way to make something from nothing. “I’m going to invent a new trick,” Kaz said. “One Van Eck will never forget.” He turned to the others. If he could have gone after Inej alone, he would have, but not even he could pull that off. “I’ll need the right crew.” Wylan got to his feet. “For the Wraith.” Jesper followed, still not meeting Kaz’s eyes. “For Inej,” he said quietly. Matthias gave a single sharp nod. Inej had wanted Kaz to become someone else, a better person, a gentler thief. But that boy had no place here. That boy ended up starving in an alley. He ended up dead. That boy couldn’t get her back. I’m going to get my money, Kaz vowed. And I’m going to get my girl. Inej could never be his, not really, but he would find a way to give her the freedom he’d promised her so long ago. Dirtyhands had come to see the rough work done.
Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
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Franklin wrote a whole essay on the subject and told one of his friends, "I have long been of your opinion, that your legal provision for the poor [in England] is a very great evil, operating as it does to the encouragement of idleness. We have followed your example, and begin now to see our error, and, I hope, shall reform it." 119    A survey of Franklin's views on counter-productive compassion might be summarized as follows:    1. Compassion which gives a drunk the means to increase his drunkenness is counter-productive. 120    2. Compassion which breeds debilitating dependency and weakness is counter-productive. 121    3. Compassion which blunts the desire or necessity to work for a living is counter-productive. 122    4. Compassion which smothers the instinct
W. Cleon Skousen (The 5000 Year Leap)
One survey of senior level women working in Silicon Valley found that 90% of women had witnessed sexist behaviour; 87% had been on the receiving end of demeaning comments by male colleagues; and 60% had received unwanted sexual advances.41 Of that 60%, more than half had been propositioned more than once, and 65% had been propositioned by a superior. One in three women surveyed had felt afraid for her personal safety.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Naturally, it causes psychological harm as well; it shouldn’t surprise you that a national survey of 24,000 workers found that men and women with few social ties were two to three times more likely to suffer from major depression than people with strong social bonds.9 When we enjoy strong social support, on the other hand, we can accomplish impressive feats of resilience, and even extend the length of our lives. One study found that people who received emotional support during the six months after a heart attack were three times more likely to survive.10 Another found that participating in a breast cancer support group actually doubled women’s life expectancy post surgery.11 In fact, researchers have found that social support has as much effect on life expectancy as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and regular physical activity.12
Shawn Achor (The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work)
we’re a pessimistic bunch. What is more surprising is that, as surveys have found, working-class whites are the most pessimistic group in America. More pessimistic than Latino immigrants, many of whom suffer unthinkable poverty. More pessimistic than black Americans, whose material prospects continue to lag behind those of whites. While reality permits some degree of cynicism, the fact that hillbillies like me are more down about the future than many other groups—some
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
Chris Argyris criticized “good communication that blocks learning,” arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because “they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability.
Peter M. Senge (The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization)
The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, founded in 1947 and devoted to promoting and affirming individual initiative and “the American dream,” releases annual back-to-school surveys.48 Its survey for 1998 contrasted two groups of students: the “highly successful” (approximately 18 percent of American students) and the “disillusioned” (approximately 15 percent). The successful students work hard, choose challenging classes, make schoolwork a top priority, get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities, and feel that teachers and administrators care about them and listen to them. According to the association, the successful group in the 1998 survey is 63 percent female and 37 percent male. The disillusioned students are pessimistic about their future, get low grades, and have little contact with teachers. The disillusioned group could accurately be characterized as demoralized. According to the Alger Association, “Nearly seven out of ten are male.”49
Christina Hoff Sommers (The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men)
But were this world ever so perfect a production, it must still remain uncertain whether all the excellences of the work can justly be ascribed to the workman. If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel when we find him a stupid mechanic who imitated others, and copied an art which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost; many fruitless trials made; and a slow but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making. In such subjects, who can determine where the truth, nay, who can conjecture where the probability lies, amidst a great number of hypotheses which may be proposed, and a still greater which may be imagined?
David Hume (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hackett Classics))
It is unsurprising, then, that we’re a pessimistic bunch. What is more surprising is that, as surveys have found, working-class whites are the most pessimistic group in America. More pessimistic than Latino immigrants, many of whom suffer unthinkable poverty. More pessimistic than black Americans, whose material prospects continue to lag behind those of whites. While reality permits some degree of cynicism, the fact that hillbillies like me are more down about the future than many other groups—some of whom are clearly more destitute than we are—suggests that something else is going on.
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
The Pew Economic Mobility Project studied how Americans evaluated their chances at economic betterment, and what they found was shocking. There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites. Well over half of blacks, Latinos, and college-educated whites expect that their children will fare better economically than they have. Among working-class whites, only 44 percent share that expectation. Even more surprising, 42 percent of working-class whites—by far the highest number in the survey—report that their lives are less economically successful than those of their parents’.
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
Having to remind your partner to do something doesn’t take that something off your list. It adds to it. And what’s more, reminding is often unfairly characterized as nagging. (Almost every man interviewed in connection with this project said nagging is what they hate most about being married, but they also admit that they wait for their wives to tell them what to do at home.) It’s not a partnership if only one of you is running the show, which means making the important distinction between delegating tasks and handing off ownership of a task. Ownership belongs to the person who first off remembers to plan, then plans, and then follows through on every aspect of executing the plan and completing the task without reminders. A survey conducted by Bright Horizons—an on-site corporate childcare provider—found that 86 percent of working mothers say they handle the majority of family and household responsibilities, “not just making appointments, but also driving to them and mentally calendaring who needs to be where, and when.” In order to save us from big-time burnout, we need our partners to be more than helpers who carry out instructions that we’ve taken time and energy to think through (and then who blame us when things fall through the cracks). We need our partners to take the lead by consistently picking up a task, or “card”—week after week—and completely taking it off our mental to-do list by doing every aspect of what the card requires. Otherwise we still worry about whether the task is being done as we would do it, or done fully, or done at all—which leaves us still shouldering the mental and emotional load for the “help” or the “favor” we had to ask for. But how do we get our partners to take that initiative and own every aspect of a household or childcare responsibility without being (nudge, nudge) told what to do? Or, to simply figure it out?
Eve Rodsky (Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (And More Life to Live))
Finally, the survey findings also lent a helping hand to those men who wanted to engage in some heartfelt wooing, by identifying the gestures that women view as most, and least, romantic. The top-ten list of gestures is shown below, along with the percentage of women who assigned each gesture maximum marks on the “how romantic is this” scale. Cover her eyes and lead her to a lovely surprise—40 percent Whisk her away somewhere exciting for the weekend—40 percent Write a song or poem about her—28 percent Tell her that she is the most wonderful woman that you have ever met—25 percent Run her a relaxing bath after she has had a bad day at work—22 percent Send her a romantic text or e-mail, or leave a note around the house—22 percent Wake her up with breakfast in bed—22 percent Offer her a coat when she is cold—18 percent Send her a large bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates at her workplace—16 percent Make her a mix CD of her favorite music—12 percent Interestingly, it seems that gestures that reflect a form of escapism and surprise top the list, followed by those that reflect thoughtfulness, with blatant acts of materialism trailing in last place—scientific evidence, perhaps, that when it comes to romance, it really is the thought that counts.
Richard Wiseman (59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot)
We invariably come back to testing as a means of understanding drug use, even though assuming these tests lead to truth puts one on shaky ground. You simply can't prove something to be true or false if the means of confirmation are easily questioned. Consider how the National Survey on Drug Use and Health concludes every four years how many meth addicts there are in the United States. First, surveyors ask employers to give their employees a questionnaire on drug use. The survey asks employees whether they have done amphetamines (not specifically methamphetamines) in their lifetime, in the last year, and/or in the last six months. First, it seems unlikely that drug addicts will take this completely optional test; will answer truthfully if they do take it; and will even be at work in the first place--as opposed to home cooking meth. Further, since methamphetamine is just one of a broad class of stimulants in the amphetamine family, an answer of yes to the question about using one amphetamine can't be taken as an answer of yes to using another. And yet, for the study's purposes, anyone who says they've done any kind of amphetamine in the last six months is considered "addicted to amphetamines," and--in a way that is impossible to understand--a certain percentage of these responders is deemed addicted to crank.
Nick Reding (Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town)
Assess The Environment Ask yourself these questions: How would you rate your own trustworthiness? How would you rate the trustworthiness of your co-workers? How would you rate your immediate supervisor? What about your company’s top management? My colleagues and I asked these questions in a survey where: on a scale of 1-10, where ten equals “can always be trusted in all situations” and one equals “can rarely or never be trusted. Respondents rated: Their own trustworthiness at an average 8.72; All of the other people they work with as a group averaging 7.59; Their immediate supervisors a bit higher, at an average 8.33; Their company’s top management the lowest, at an average 6.43. The results indicate that we generally judge others to be less trustworthy than ourselves. If most of the people you work with are also like our survey respondents, they are making the same judgments. That means it is very likely some of the people you work with judge you to be less trustworthy than you consider yourself to be. Your first thought may be that they are mistaken. Certainly you don’t intend to act in ways others view as untrustworthy, so they must be misinterpreting your intentions. But the fact is people act on their assessments of your trustworthiness, not yours. Your best intentions can’t change their opinion. Only by changing what you say and how you act can affect how others assess your trustworthiness.
Charles Feltman (The Thin Book of Trust; An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work)
Many ordinary Americans believe that “large differences in income are necessary for America’s prosperity,” as one standard survey question puts it.18 However, economists who have studied the relationship between inequality and economic growth have found little evidence that large disparities in income and wealth promote growth.19 There is not even much hard evidence in support of the commonsense notion that progressive tax rates retard growth by discouraging economic effort. Indeed, one liberal economist, Robert Frank, has written that “the lessons of experience are downright brutal” to the notion that higher taxes would stifle economic growth by causing wealthy people to work less or take fewer risks.
Larry M. Bartels (Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age)
The Entrepreneurial Model What does The Entrepreneur see off in the distance that The Technician finds so difficult to see? What exactly is the Entrepreneurial Model? It’s a model of a business that fulfills the perceived needs of a specific segment of customers in an innovative way. The Entrepreneurial Model looks at a business as if it were a product, sitting on a shelf and competing for the customer’s attention against a whole shelf of competing products (or businesses). Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model, he surveys the world and asks: “Where is the opportunity?” Having identified it, he then goes back to the drawing board and constructs a solution to the frustrations he finds among a certain group of customers. A solution in the form of a business that looks and acts in a very specific way, the way the customer needs it to look and act, not The Entrepreneur. “How will my business look to the customer?” The Entrepreneur asks. “How will my business stand out from all the rest?” Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed. The Technician, on the other hand, looks inwardly, to
Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
Hebrews has been referred to as the fifth gospel because it tells of Jesus’ finished work on earth and His continuing work in heaven. There is no other book in the New Testament that helps us to understand the present ministry of Christ as does the book of Hebrews. Many Christians know little about Christ’s present work for His people. Hebrews shows us that just as God led the Israelites from Egypt through the barren wilderness, protecting them from danger, supplying all their needs, teaching them, training them, and eventually bringing them into the rich land of Canaan, so Christ is at this present time helping His children, by intercession, inspiration, instruction, and indwelling, to enter into the spiritual rest land of abundant living, a taste of the heavenly glories to come.
Irving L. Jensen (Jensen's Survey of the New Testament)
We have a legal system that is a flop — a laughingstock,” says Professor Langbein. “We have a legal system which encourages people not to want to do business in this country.” The American legal system isn’t even working for the lawyers. Even though law is now the highest-paid profession, the lawyers aren’t happy. Many say they went to law school hoping to do good, but now find themselves working incredibly long hours doing tedious work that’s often more about money than justice. A survey of California lawyers found most would change careers if they could. Something’s very wrong when America’s brightest young people are choosing a profession many won’t like, where they’re not building something, not making the economic pie bigger, just fighting over who gets which slice, making each slice cost more, and taking our freedom in the process.
John Stossel (Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...)
Mark Twain didn’t dabble in psychological focus groups, but he certainly knew something about human nature when he wrote, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” A series of surveys explored the premise that time is an important variable in this equation. Researchers asked a random sampling of people, “When you look back on your experiences in life and think of those things that you regret, what would you say you regret more, those things that you did, but wish you hadn’t, or those things that you didn’t do, but wish you had?” The results found that regrettable “failures to act” outnumbered “regrettable actions” by a two-to-one margin and that this was true for both sexes.
Chip Conley (Emotional Equations: Simple formulas to help your life work better)
This kind of parenting was typical in much of Asia—and among Asian immigrant parents living in the United States. Contrary to the stereotype, it did not necessarily make children miserable. In fact, children raised in this way in the United States tended not only to do better in school but to actually enjoy reading and school more than their Caucasian peers enrolled in the same schools. While American parents gave their kids placemats with numbers on them and called it a day, Asian parents taught their children to add before they could read. They did it systematically and directly, say, from six-thirty to seven each night, with a workbook—not organically, the way many American parents preferred their children to learn math. The coach parent did not necessarily have to earn a lot of money or be highly educated. Nor did a coach parent have to be Asian, needless to say. The research showed that European-American parents who acted more like coaches tended to raise smarter kids, too. Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they were young raised children who scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher on PISA. By contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit. And at least one high-impact form of parental involvement did not actually involve kids or schools at all: If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said. Only four in ten parents in the PISA survey regularly read at home for enjoyment. What if they knew that this one change—which they might even vaguely enjoy—would help their children become better readers themselves? What if schools, instead of pleading with parents to donate time, muffins, or money, loaned books and magazines to parents and urged them to read on their own and talk about what they’d read in order to help their kids? The evidence suggested that every parent could do things that helped create strong readers and thinkers, once they knew what those things were. Parents could go too far with the drills and practice in academics, just as they could in sports, and many, many Korean parents did go too far. The opposite was also true. A coddled, moon bounce of a childhood could lead to young adults who had never experienced failure or developed self-control or endurance—experiences that mattered as much or more than academic skills. The evidence suggested that many American parents treated their children as if they were delicate flowers. In one Columbia University study, 85 percent of American parents surveyed said that they thought they needed to praise their children’s intelligence in order to assure them they were smart. However, the actual research on praise suggested the opposite was true. Praise that was vague, insincere, or excessive tended to discourage kids from working hard and trying new things. It had a toxic effect, the opposite of what parents intended. To work, praise had to be specific, authentic, and rare. Yet the same culture of self-esteem boosting extended to many U.S. classrooms.
Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
So, absent the chance to make every job applicant work as hard as a college applicant, is there some quick, clever, cheap way of weeding out bad employees before they are hired? Zappos has come up with one such trick. You will recall from the last chapter that Zappos, the online shoe store, has a variety of unorthodox ideas about how a business can be run. You may also recall that its customer-service reps are central to the firm’s success. So even though the job might pay only $11 an hour, Zappos wants to know that each new employee is fully committed to the company’s ethos. That’s where “The Offer” comes in. When new employees are in the onboarding period—they’ve already been screened, offered a job, and completed a few weeks of training—Zappos offers them a chance to quit. Even better, quitters will be paid for their training time and also get a bonus representing their first month’s salary—roughly $2,000—just for quitting! All they have to do is go through an exit interview and surrender their eligibility to be rehired at Zappos. Doesn’t that sound nuts? What kind of company would offer a new employee $2,000 to not work? A clever company. “It’s really putting the employee in the position of ‘Do you care more about money or do you care more about this culture and the company?’ ” says Tony Hsieh, the company’s CEO. “And if they care more about the easy money, then we probably aren’t the right fit for them.” Hsieh figured that any worker who would take the easy $2,000 was the kind of worker who would end up costing Zappos a lot more in the long run. By one industry estimate, it costs an average of roughly $4,000 to replace a single employee, and one recent survey of 2,500 companies found that a single bad hire can cost more than $25,000 in lost productivity, lower morale, and the like. So Zappos decided to pay a measly $2,000 up front and let the bad hires weed themselves out before they took root. As of this writing, fewer than 1 percent of new hires at Zappos accept “The Offer.
Steven D. Levitt (Think Like a Freak)
The curious advantage of being able to survey the span of someone else’s life, from start to finish, can seem peremptory, high-handed, forward. Grief doesn’t seem entitlement enough for the arrogation of the divine powers of beginning and ending. We are uneasy with such omniscience. We do not possess it with regard to our own lives. But if this ability to see the whole of a life is God-like it also augurs a revolt against God: once a life is contained, made final, as if flattened within the pages of a diary, it becomes a smaller, contracted thing. It is just a life, one of millions, as arbitrary as everyone else’s, a named tenancy that will soon become a nameless one; a life that we know, with horror, will be thoroughly forgotten within a few generations. At the very moment we play at being God, we also work against God, hurl down the script, refuse the terms of the drama, appalled by the meaninglessness and ephemerality of existence. Death gives birth to the first question—Why?—and seems to kill all the answers.
James Wood
Arin watched the fire flare crimson. Then he went outside and surveyed the grounds, saw through leafless trees that no one was near. He could steal a few minutes. When he stepped back inside the forge, he leaned against the anvil. With one hand he pulled a book from its hiding place behind the kindling box, and in the other he held a hammer so that, if in danger of being caught, he could more quickly pretend to have been working. He began to read. It was a book he had seen in Kestrel’s possession, one on the history of the Valorian empire. He had taken it from the library after she had returned it, weeks ago. What would she say, if she saw him reading a book about his enemy, in his enemy’s tongue? What would she do? Arin knew this: her gaze would measure him, and he would sense a shift of perception within her. Her opinion of him would change as daylight changed, growing or losing shadow. Subtle. Almost indiscernible. She would see him differently, though he wouldn’t know in what way. He wouldn’t know what it meant. This had happened, again and again, since he had come here. Sometimes he wished he had never come here. Well. Kestrel couldn’t see him in the forge, or know what he read, because she couldn’t leave her rooms. She couldn’t even walk. Arin shut the book, gripped it between rigid fingers. He nearly threw it into the fire. I will have you torn limb from limb, the general had said. That wasn’t why Arin stayed away from her. Not really. He forced his thoughts from his head. He hid the book where it had been. He busied himself with quiet work, heating iron and charcoal in a crucible to produce steel. It took some time before Arin realized he was humming a dark tune. For once, he didn’t stop himself. The pressure of song was too strong, the need for distraction too great. Then he found that the music caged behind his closed teeth was the melody Kestrel had played for him months ago. He felt the sensation of it, low and alive, on his mouth. For a moment, he imagined it wasn’t the melody that touched his lips, but Kestrel. The thought stopped his breath, and the music, too.
Marie Rutkoski (The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1))
Unnecessary Creation gives you the freedom to explore new possibilities and follow impractical curiosities. Some of the most frustrated creative pros I’ve encountered are those who expect their day job to allow them to fully express their creativity and satisfy their curiosity. They push against the boundaries set by their manager or client and fret continuously that their best work never finds its way into the end product because of restrictions and compromises. A 2012 survey sponsored by Adobe revealed that nearly 75 percent of workers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan felt they weren’t living up to their creative potential. (In the United States, the number was closer to 82 percent!) Obviously, there’s a gap between what many creatives actually do each day and what they feel they are capable of doing given more resources or less bureaucracy. But those limitations aren’t likely to change in the context of an organization, where there is little tolerance for risk and resources are scarcer than ever. If day-to-day project work is the only work that you are engaging in, it follows that you’re going to get frustrated. To break the cycle, keep a running list of projects you’d like to attempt in your spare time, and set aside a specific time each week (or each day) to make progress on that list. Sometimes this feels very inefficient in the moment, especially when there are so many other urgent priorities screaming for your attention, but it can be a key part of keeping your creative energy flowing for your day-to-day work. You’ll also want to get a notebook to record questions that you’d like to pursue, ideas that you have, or experiments that you’d like to try. Then you can use your pre-defined Unnecessary Creation time to play with these ideas. As Steven Johnson explains in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, “A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.”18
Jocelyn K. Glei (Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind)
The rise of loneliness as a health hazard tracks with the entrenchment of values and practices that supersede any notion of "individual choices." The dynamics include reduced social programs, less available "common" spaces such as public libraries, cuts in services for the vulnerable and the elderly, stress, poverty, and the inexorable monopolization of economic life that shreds local communities. By way of illustration, let's take a familiar scenario: Walmart or some other megastore decides to open one of its facilities in a municipality. Developers are happy, politicians welcome the new investment, and consumers are pleased at finding a wide variety of goods at lower prices. But what are the social impacts? Locally owned and operated small businesses cannot compete with the marketing behemoth and must close. People lose their jobs or must find new work for lower pay. Neighborhoods are stripped of the familiar hardware store, pharmacy, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. People no longer walk to their local establishment, where they meet and greet one another and familiar merchants they have known, but drive, each isolated in their car, to a windowless, aesthetically bereft warehouse, miles away from home. They might not even leave home at all — why bother, when you can order online? No wonder international surveys show a rise in loneliness. The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as lonely has doubled from 20 to 40 percent since the 1980s, the New York Times reported in 2016. Alarmed by the health ravages, Britain has even found it necessary to appoint a minister of loneliness. Describing the systemic founts of loneliness, the U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote: "Our twenty-first-century world demands that we focus on pursuits that seem to be in constant competition for our time, attention, energy, and commitment. Many of these pursuits are themselves competitions. We compete for jobs and status. We compete over possessions, money, and reputations. We strive to stay afloat and to get ahead. Meanwhile, the relationships we prize often get neglected in the chase." It is easy to miss the point that what Dr. Murthy calls "our twenty-first-century world" is no abstract entity, but the concrete manifestation of a particular socioeconomic system, a distinct worldview, and a way of life.
Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
I lift the lid of the chest. Inside, the air is musty and stale, held hostage for years in its three-foot-by-four-foot tomb. I lean in to survey the contents cautiously, then pull out a stack of old photos tied with twine. On top is a photo of a couple on their wedding day. She's a young bride, wearing one of those 1950's netted veils. He looks older, distinguished- sort of like Cary Grant or Gregory Peck in the old black-and-white movies I used to watch with my grandmother. I set the stack down and turn back to the chest, where I find a notebook, filled with handwritten recipes. The page for Cinnamon Rolls is labeled "Dex's Favorite." 'Dex.' I wonder if he's the man in the photo. There are two ticket stubs from 1959, one to a Frank Sinatra concert, another to the movie 'An Affair to Remember.' A single shriveled rosebud rests on a white handkerchief. A corsage? When I lift it into my hand, it disintegrates; the petals crinkle into tiny pieces that fall onto the living room carpet. At the bottom of the chest is what looks like a wedding dress. It's yellowed and moth-eaten, but I imagine it was once stark white and beautiful. As I lift it, I can hear the lace swishing as if to say, "Ahh." Whoever wore it was very petite. The waist circumference is tiny. A pair of long white gloves falls to the floor. They must have been tucked inside the dress. I refold the finery and set the ensemble back inside. Whose things are these? And why have they been left here? I thumb through the recipe book. All cookies, cakes, desserts. She must have loved to bake. I tuck the book back inside the chest, along with the photographs after I've retied the twine, which is when I notice a book tucked into the corner. It's an old paperback copy of Ernest Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises.' I've read a little of Hemingway over the years- 'A Moveable Feast' and some of his later work- but not this one. I flip through the book and notice that one page is dog-eared. I open to it and see a line that has been underscored. "You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another." I look out to the lake, letting the words sink in. 'Is that what I'm trying to do? Get away from myself?' I stare at the line in the book again and wonder if it resonated with the woman who underlined it so many years ago. Did she have her own secret pain? 'Was she trying to escape it just like me?
Sarah Jio (Morning Glory)
They will have landed,” and she felt that she had been right. They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same things and he had answered her without her asking him anything. He stood there spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly, compassionately, their final destiny. Now he has crowned the occasion, she thought, when his hand slowly fell, as if she had seen him let fall from his great height a wreath of violets and asphodels which, fluttering slowly, lay at length upon the earth. Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.
Virginia Woolf (Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works)
Our exploration into advertising and media is at its root a critique of the exploitative nature of capitalism and consumerism. Our economic systems shape how we see our bodies and the bodies of others, and they ultimately inform what we are compelled to do and buy based on that reflection. Profit-greedy industries work with media outlets to offer us a distorted perception of ourselves and then use that distorted self-image to sell us remedies for the distortion. Consider that the female body type portrayed in advertising as the “ideal” is possessed naturally by only 5 percent of American women. Whereas the average U.S. woman is five feet four inches tall and weighs 140 pounds, the average U.S. model is five feet eleven and weighs 117. Now consider a People magazine survey which reported that 80 percent of women respondents said images of women on television and in the movies made them feel insecure. Together, those statistics and those survey results illustrate a regenerative market of people who feel deficient based on the images they encounter every day, seemingly perfectly matched with advertisers and manufacturers who have just the products to sell them (us) to fix those imagined deficiencies.18
Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
Due to the various pragmatic obstacles, it is rare for a mission-critical analysis to be done in the “fully Bayesian” manner, i.e., without the use of tried-and-true frequentist tools at the various stages. Philosophy and beauty aside, the reliability and efficiency of the underlying computations required by the Bayesian framework are the main practical issues. A central technical issue at the heart of this is that it is much easier to do optimization (reliably and efficiently) in high dimensions than it is to do integration in high dimensions. Thus the workhorse machine learning methods, while there are ongoing efforts to adapt them to Bayesian framework, are almost all rooted in frequentist methods. A work-around is to perform MAP inference, which is optimization based. Most users of Bayesian estimation methods, in practice, are likely to use a mix of Bayesian and frequentist tools. The reverse is also true—frequentist data analysts, even if they stay formally within the frequentist framework, are often influenced by “Bayesian thinking,” referring to “priors” and “posteriors.” The most advisable position is probably to know both paradigms well, in order to make informed judgments about which tools to apply in which situations.
Jake Vanderplas (Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy: A Practical Python Guide for the Analysis of Survey Data (Princeton Series in Modern Observational Astronomy, 1))
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Where to stash your organizational risk? Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and it represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems that are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones,16 and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate! The larger and older your organization is, the more you’ll find perched on your capable shoulders. How you respond to this is, in my opinion, the core challenge of leading a large organization. How do you continue to remain emotionally engaged with the challenges faced by individuals you’re responsible to help, when their problem is low in your problems queue? In that moment, do you shrug off the responsibility, either by changing roles or picking powerlessness? Hide in indifference? Become so hard on yourself that you collapse inward? I’ve tried all of these! They weren’t very satisfying. What I’ve found most successful is to identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly. Work with your manager to write this up as an explicit plan and agree on what reasonable progress looks like. These issues are still stored with your other bags of risk and responsibility, but you’ve agreed on expectations. Now you have a set of organizational risks that you’re pretty confident will get fixed, and then you have all the others: known problems, likely to go sideways, that you don’t believe you’re able to address quickly. What do you do about those? I like to keep them close. Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If something simply isn’t likely to go well, I think it’s best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you’re almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility. As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.
Will Larson (An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management)
The summer king customarily delivers a brief poem or statement before he convenes the special sessions. Enki gives them quite a bit more than that. “In the verde,” says Enki, as serious as I’ve ever seen him, “we love the storms. Sometimes, when we see one come in, the blocos will set up in the terraces and play until the rain drives us inside.” He pauses here, as though considering his next words, though I can tell he’s just savoring the moment. My last present from the verde must have gone through. Everyone in the audience shuffles uncomfortably. Nostrils flair, discreet coughs echo through the chamber. Some look at Enki, others at one another or the doorways. Enki takes a deep breath, as though he doesn’t notice a thing. “We have a saying,” he says as murmurs from his audience rise to a wave, “you can’t smell the catinga until it comes back home.” In the background, I can just make out several guards hurrying through the doors. Enki surveys his work and smiles, a sun breaking through clouds. “I hereby convene parliament.” As he saunters back to his seat, Auntie Isa rushes the podium with a handkerchief covering her nose and murder in her eyes. People stand up and hurry to the doors. They don’t know the smell will be even worse in the hallway. Our transport pods are all connected to the ventilation system. It’s meant to help refresh the air supply in the tunnels, but it can go the other direction. It can carry the fetid stink of the verde straight to the noses of people who pretend it doesn’t exist.
Alaya Dawn Johnson (The Summer Prince)
IF, O most illustrious Knight, I had driven a plough, pastured a herd, tended a garden, tailored a garment: none would regard me, few observe me, seldom a one reprove me; and I could easily satisfy all men. But since I would survey the field of Nature, care for the nourishment of the soul, foster the cultivation of talent, become expert as Daedalus concerning the ways of the intellect; lo, one doth threaten upon beholding me, another doth assail me at sight, another doth bite upon reaching me, yet another who hath caught me would devour me; not one, nor few, they are many, indeed almost all. If you would know why, it is because I hate the mob, I loathe the vulgar herd and in the multitude I find no joy. It is Unity that doth enchant me. By her power I am free though thrall, happy in sorrow, rich in poverty, and quick even in death. Through her virtue I envy not those who are bond though free, who grieve in the midst of pleasures, who endure poverty in their wealth, and a living death. They carry their chains within them; their spirit containeth her own hell that bringeth them low; within their soul is the disease that wasteth, and within their mind the lethargy that bringeth death. They are without the generosity that would enfranchise, the long suffering that exalteth, the splendour that doth illumine, knowledge that bestoweth life. Therefore I do not in weariness shun the arduous path, nor idly refrain my arm from the present task, nor retreat in despair from the enemy that confronteth me, nor do I turn my dazzled eyes from the divine end. Yet I am aware that I am mostly held to be a sophist, seeking rather to appear subtle than to reveal the truth; an ambitious fellow diligent rather to support a new and false sect than to establish the ancient and true; a snarer of birds who pursueth the splendour of fame, by spreading ahead the darkness of error; an unquiet spirit that would undermine the edifice of good discipline to establish the frame of perversity. Wherefore, my lord, may the heavenly powers scatter before me all those who unjustly hate me; may my God be ever gracious unto me; may all the rulers of our world be favourable to me; may the stars yield me seed for the field and soil for the seed, that the harvest of my labour may appear to the world useful and glorious, that souls may be awakened and the understanding of those in darkness be illumined. For assuredly I do not feign; and if I err, I do so unwittingly; nor do I in speech or writing contend merely for victory, for I hold worldly repute and hollow success without truth to be hateful to God, most vile and dishonourable. But I thus exhaust, vex and torment myself for love of true wisdom and zeal for true contemplation. This I shall make manifest by conclusive arguments, dependent on lively reasonings derived from regulated sensation, instructed by true phenomena; for these as trustworthy ambassadors emerge from objects of Nature, rendering themselves present to those who seek them, obvious to those who gaze attentively on them, clear to those who apprehend, certain and sure to those who understand. Thus I present to you my contemplation concerning the infinite universe and innumerable worlds.
Giordano Bruno (On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues (Collected Works of Giordano Bruno Book 2))
Although Israel is targeted by terrorists much more frequently than the United States, Israelis do not live in fear of terrorism. A 2012 survey of Israeli Jews found that only 16 percent described terrorism as their greatest fear81—no more than the number who said they were worried about Israel’s education system. No Israeli politician would say outright that he tolerates small-scale terrorism, but that’s essentially what the country does. It tolerates it because the alternative—having everyone be paralyzed by fear—is incapacitating and in line with the terrorists’ goals. A key element in the country’s strategy is making life as normal as possible for people after an attack occurs. For instance, police typically try to clear the scene of an attack within four hours of a bomb going off,82 letting everyone get back to work, errands, or even leisure. Small-scale terrorism is treated more like crime than an existential threat. What Israel certainly does not tolerate is the potential for large-scale terrorism (as might be made more likely, for instance, by one of their neighbors acquiring weapons of mass destruction). There is some evidence that their approach is successful: Israel is the one country that has been able to bend Clauset’s curve. If we plot the fatality tolls from terrorist incidents in Israel using the power-law method (figure 13-8), we find that there have been significantly fewer large-scale terror attacks than the power-law would predict; no incident since 1979 has killed more than two hundred people. The fact that Israel’s power-law graph looks so distinct is evidence that our strategic choices do make some difference.
Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't)
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.
Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition)
Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.
Lyssa Adkins (Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition)