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Even the word itself, human, means flawed. It means everything is technically correct but some unanticipated trouble has fouled it up. If the assignment had been to be human, to fail, then I succeeded. But if it was to create a comprehensive document of life on Earth, I was always doomed. Language is pitiable when weighed against experience.
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Marie-Helene Bertino (Beautyland)
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A technical summary on pressure piping Engineering and Regulatory documents used in Quality Control and Construction of Pressure Piping
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Shahin Shardi
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The success of the documentation efforts lies in the users being able to correctly locate and use the resolutions to their issues on time and retain that knowledge for later use.
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Suyog Ketkar (The Write Stride)
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The repeated deaths of civilizations from internal disintegration and outward assault, massively documented by Arnold Toynbee, underscores the fact that the evil elements in this amalgam largely cancelled the benefits and blessings. The one lasting contribution of the megamachine was the myth of the machine itself: the notion that this machine was, by its very nature, absolutely irresistible- and yet, provided one did not oppose it, ultimately beneficent. That magical spell still enthralls both the controllers and the mass victims of the megamachine today.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
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Police throughout the United States have been caught fabricating, planting, and manipulating evidence to obtain convictions where cases would otherwise be very weak. Some authorities regard police perjury as so rampant that it can be considered a "subcultural norm rather than an individual aberration" of police officers. Large-scale investigations of police units in almost every major American city have documented massive evidence of tampering, abuse of the arresting power, and discriminatory enforcement of laws. There also appears to be widespread police perjury in the preparation of reports because police know these reports will be used in plea bargaining. Officers often justify false and embellished reports on the grounds that it metes out a rough justice to defendants who are guilty of wrongdoing but may be exonerated on technicalities. [internal citations omitted]
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Dale Carpenter (Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas)
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my own primary curiosity was still technical in nature. It’s all well and good to read a document or to click through the slides of a PowerPoint presentation to find out what a program is intended to do, but the better you can understand a program’s mechanics, the better you can understand its potential for abuse.
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Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
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If the Eloquent peasant finally obtained justice, as seems indicated at the point where the document breaks off, it was only, we should remember, after he had been teased and tormented, even flogged, by his betters merely to increase their amusement over his delightful impudence in standing up for his rights and answering back.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
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How much ever we may underpin cognitive learning theories in technical communication and document design, the users invariably learn more when they are unknowingly
involved in the learning process: users learn more when they aren’t learning. Conclusively, we must focus on experimentation and empowerment, and not on learning alone.
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Suyog Ketkar (The Write Stride)
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I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (The Lost Tools of Learning)
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In a classic study of how names impact people’s experience on the job market, researchers show that, all other things being equal, job seekers with White-sounding first names received 50 percent more callbacks from employers than job seekers with Black-sounding names.5 They calculated that the racial gap was equivalent to eight years of relevant work experience, which White applicants did not actually have; and the gap persisted across occupations, industry, employer size – even when employers included the “equal opportunity” clause in their ads.6 With emerging technologies we might assume that racial bias will be more scientifically rooted out. Yet, rather than challenging or overcoming the cycles of inequity, technical fixes too often reinforce and even deepen the status quo. For example, a study by a team of computer scientists at Princeton examined whether a popular algorithm, trained on human writing online, would exhibit the same biased tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. They found that the algorithm associated White-sounding names with “pleasant” words and Black-sounding names with “unpleasant” ones.7 Such findings demonstrate what I call “the New Jim Code”: the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.
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Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code)
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Actually, it meant a great deal: a very great deal. You don't have to believe that God exists to see that a story in which God takes on human form is a very different story from one in which God creates a messenger and tells that messenger to take on human form. The Passion of the Christ is a different movie depending on whether you think the person being eviscerated is God or just some guy. Athanasius thought that it was God who hung on a cross for the world; Arius thought that it was a created being who was not God. This is not very little; this is very big. Granted, the Creeds put it in terms of Aristotelian theories about "substance" and "essence": but there isn't much sense in complaining that technical documents are written in technical language if you are not prepared to pick up a standard work and look up what the words mean.
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Andrew Rilstone (Where Dawkins Went Wrong)
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For instance, there was the case of Nancy Schmeing, who had recently earned her doctorate in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Incredibly, Schmeing failed the reading comprehension section of the new [Massachusetts] teacher test, which required one to quickly read short essays and then choose the one "best" answer among those provided by the test maker. The exam supposedly assessed one's ability to boil down the essential meanings of prose. Schmeing's failing the reading section created a small furor about the test's credibility. After graduating from MIT, Schmeing worked as a technical consultant, translating engineering, science, and business documents for clients around the world. Thus, the very nature of her work necessitated the ability to find essential meanings in written texts, to comprehend a writer's purpose, and so forth.
Moreover, Schmeing was a Fulbright scholar, had graduated magnum cum laude from college ... Schmeing's failure simply defied common sense, fueling concerns over the exam's predictive validity.
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Peter Sacks (Standardized Minds: The High Price Of America's Testing Culture And What We Can Do To Change It)
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Quantum uncertainty and chaos theory have had deplorable effects upon popular culture, much to the annoyance of genuine aficionados. Both are regularly exploited by obscurantists, ranging from professional quacks to daffy New Agers. In America, the self-help ‘healing’ industry coins millions, and it has not been slow to cash in on quantum theory’s formidable talent to bewilder. This has been documented by the American physicist Victor Stenger. One well-heeled healer wrote a string of best-selling books on what he calls ‘Quantum Healing’. Another book in my possession has sections on quantum psychology, quantum responsibility, quantum morality, quantum aesthetics, quantum immortality and quantum theology. Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for ‘chaos’ implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions. Undoubtedly it is mathematically interesting.
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Richard Dawkins (Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist)
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Business leadership is based on two elements: vision and technical competence. Top people in a given industry always embody at least one of those two elements. Sometimes, but rarely, they embody both of them. Simply put, vision is the ability to see what other people don’t. It’s a Ford executive named Lee Iacocca realizing that a market existed for an automobile that was both a racing car and a street vehicle—and coming up with the Mustang. It’s Steven Jobs realizing that computers needed to be sold in a single box, like a television sets, instead of piece by piece. About one hundred years ago, Walter Chrysler was a plant manager for a locomotive company. Then he decided to go into the car business, which was a hot new industry at the time. The trouble was, Walter Chrysler didn’t know a lot about cars, except that they were beginning to outnumber horses on the public roadways. To remedy this problem, Chrysler bought one of the Model T Fords that were becoming so popular. To learn how it worked, he took it apart and put it back together. Then, just to be sure he understood everything, he repeated this. Then, to be absolutely certain he knew what made a car work, he took it apart and put it together forty-eight more times, for a grand total of fifty. By the time he was finished, Chrysler not only had a vision of thousands of cars on American highways, he also had the mechanical details of those cars engraved in his consciousness. Perhaps you’ve seen the play called The Music Man. It’s about a fast-talking man who arrives in a small town with the intention of hugely upgrading a marching band. However, he can’t play any instruments, doesn’t know how to lead a band, and doesn’t really have any musical skills whatsoever. The Music Man is a comedy, but it’s not totally unrealistic. Some managers in the computer industry don’t know how to format a document. Some automobile executives could not change a tire. There was once even a vice president who couldn’t spell potato. It’s not a good idea to lack the fundamental technical skills of your industry, and it’s really not a good idea to get caught lacking them. So let’s see what you can do to avoid those problems.
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Dale Carnegie (Make Yourself Unforgettable: How to Become the Person Everyone Remembers and No One Can Resist (Dale Carnegie Books))
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Every religious order has something similar to the Constitutions. Usually it’s called a “rule,” as in the Rule of St. Benedict, which governs life in the Benedictine order. Each rule is a window into the underlying spirituality, or “charism,” of the religious order. You can learn a great deal about the Benedictines by reading their Rule. And you can learn a lot about Ignatian spirituality by reading the Constitutions. (Technically our “rule” also includes the original papal documents, issued by Pope Paul III and Pope Julius III, establishing the Jesuits.) For the Jesuit, if the Exercises are about how to live your own life, the Constitutions are about how to live your life with others. The Exercises are about you and God; the Constitutions, at least for Jesuits, are about you, God, and your brother Jesuits.
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James Martin (The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life)
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The most impressive documentation of Europe’s rising creative powers may be found in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). During their successive rediscoveries in modern times, these astonishing collections were mistakenly perceived as sketches of original inventions, products of an individual “Renaissance” genius. The misconception was due in part to the aesthetic quality of the drawings, and in part to a prevailing notion of the character of invention, an exaggeration of the contribution of the individual “inventor” and an underappreciation of the social nature of technical innovation.
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Frances Gies (Cathedral, Forge & Waterwheel: Technology & Invention in the Middle Ages)
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20 percent of scientists in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) reported being directed to “inappropriately exclude or alter technical information” from scientific documents. In a survey of EPA scientists, 18 percent said they had experienced frequent or occasional edits during review of documents to “change the meaning of scientific findings.” One high-profile example investigated by the EPA’s Office of Inspector General involved the regulation of mercury emissions from coal-fired plants. In the process of preparing a proposed rule, EPA senior management instructed staffers to manipulate technical and scientific analysis in order to keep costs down for the electric utility industry.
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Mary Christina Wood (Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age)
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Millions of copies of drivers’ licenses, social security cards, and other supporting documents were faxed to a centralized document processing center in Grant County; so many of them disappeared that advocates started calling it “the black hole in Marion.” Each month the number of verification documents that vanished—were not attached properly to digital case files in a process called “indexing”—rose exponentially. According to court documents, in December 2007 just over 11,000 documents were unindexed. By February 2009, nearly 283,000 documents had disappeared, an increase of 2,473 percent. The rise in technical errors far outpaced increased system use. The consequences are staggering if you consider that any single missing document could cause an applicant to be denied benefits.
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Virginia Eubanks (Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor)
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Indeed, as evidenced in a CIA memo contained in the 2017 released documents, Zahedi’s having been a Nazi collaborator was seen as an asset to the Americans. As the memo, detailing US assets in Iran, explains, “Associated with the Nazi efforts in Iran during World War II, he has long been firmly anti-Soviet. A pro-Western orientation is reflected in the education of his son in the U.S. and the activity of his son in the Point IV [Truman’s Cold War technical assistance plan to developing countries] in Iran….” The memo goes on to say that the CIA’s contacts in Iran believed Zahedi “to be the only military man on the scene who would stage a coup and follow it through with forcefulness.”20
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Dan Kovalik (The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran)
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Here’s something you may not know: every time you go to Facebook or ESPN.com or wherever, you’re unleashing a mad scramble of money, data, and pixels that involves undersea fiber-optic cables, the world’s best database technologies, and everything that is known about you by greedy strangers. Every. Single. Time. The magic of how this happens is called “real-time bidding” (RTB) exchanges, and we’ll get into the technical details before long. For now, imagine that every time you go to CNN.com, it’s as though a new sell order for one share in your brain is transmitted to a stock exchange. Picture it: individual quanta of human attention sold, bit by bit, like so many million shares of General Motors stock, billions of times a day. Remember Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, Goldman Sachs’s old-school brokerage acquisition, and its disappearing (or disappeared) traders? The company went from hundreds of traders and two programmers to twenty programmers and two traders in a few years. That same process was just starting in the media world circa 2009, and is right now, in 2016, kicking into high gear. As part of that shift, one of the final paroxysms of wasted effort at Adchemy was taking place precisely in the RTB space. An engineer named Matthew McEachen, one of Adchemy’s best, and I built an RTB bidding engine that talked to Google’s huge ad exchange, the figurative New York Stock Exchange of media, and submitted bids and ads at speeds of upwards of one hundred thousand requests per second. We had been ordered to do so only to feed some bullshit line Murthy was laying on potential partners that we were a real-time ads-buying company. Like so much at Adchemy, that technology would be a throwaway, but the knowledge I gained there, from poring over Google’s RTB technical documentation and passing Google’s merciless integration tests with our code, would set me light-years ahead of the clueless product team at Facebook years later.
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Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
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Building an airplane was nothing compared to shepherding research through Langley's grueling review process. "Present your case, build, sell it,= so they believe it" --- that was the Langley way. The author of a NACA document --- a technical report was the most comprehensive and exacting, a technical memorandum slightly less formal --- faced a firing squad of four or five people, chosen for their expertise in the topic. After a presentation of findings, the committee, which had read and analyzed the report in advance, let loose a barrage of questions and comments. The committee was brusque, thorough, and relentless in rooting out inaccuracies, inconsistencies, incomprehensible statements, and illogical conclusions obscured by technical gibberish. And that was before subjecting the report to the style, clarity, grammar, and presentation standards that were Pearl Young's legacy, before the addition of the charts and fancy graphics that reduced the data sheet to a coherent, visually persuasive point. A final report might be months, even years, in the making.
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Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures)
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Anil Gupta
“
Some people believe labor-saving technological change is bad for the workers because it throws them out of work. This is the Luddite fallacy, one of the silliest ideas to ever come along in the long tradition of silly ideas in economics. Seeing why it's silly is a good way to illustrate further Solow's logic.
The original Luddites were hosiery and lace workers in Nottingham, England, in 1811. They smashed knitting machines that embodied new labor-saving technology as a protest against unemployment (theirs), publicizing their actions in circulars mysteriously signed "King Ludd." Smashing machines was understandable protection of self-interest for the hosiery workers. They had skills specific to the old technology and knew their skills would not be worth much with the new technology. English government officials, after careful study, addressed the Luddites' concern by hanging fourteen of them in January 1813.
The intellectual silliness came later, when some thinkers generalized the Luddites' plight into the Luddite fallacy: that an economy-wide technical breakthrough enabling production of the same amount of goods with fewer workers will result in an economy with - fewer workers. Somehow it never occurs to believers in Luddism that there's another alternative: produce more goods with the same number of workers. Labor-saving technology is another term for output-per-worker-increasing technology. All of the incentives of a market economy point toward increasing investment and output rather than decreasing employment; otherwise some extremely dumb factory owners are foregoing profit opportunities. With more output for the same number of workers, there is more income for each worker.
Of course, there could very well be some unemployment of workers who know only the old technology - like the original Luddites - and this unemployment will be excruciating to its victims. But workers as a whole are better off with more powerful output-producing technology available to them. Luddites confuse the shift of employment from old to new technologies with an overall decline in employment. The former happens; the latter doesn't. Economies experiencing technical progress, like Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, do not show any long-run trend toward increasing unemployment; they do show a long-run trend toward increasing income per worker.
Solow's logic had made clear that labor-saving technical advance was the only way that output per worker could keep increasing in the long run. The neo-Luddites, with unintentional irony, denigrate the only way that workers' incomes can keep increasing in the long-run: labor-saving technological progress.
The Luddite fallacy is very much alive today. Just check out such a respectable document as the annual Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program. The 1996 Human Development Report frets about "jobless growth" in many countries. The authors say "jobless growth" happens whenever the rate of employment growth is not as high as the rate of output growth, which leads to "very low incomes" for millions of workers. The 1993 Human Development Report expressed the same concern about this "problem" of jobless growth, which was especially severe in developing countries between 1960 and 1973: "GDP growth rates were fairly high, but employment growth rates were less than half this." Similarly, a study of Vietnam in 2000 lamented the slow growth of manufacturing employment relative to manufacturing output. The authors of all these reports forget that having GDP rise faster than employment is called growth of income per worker, which happens to be the only way that workers "very low incomes" can increase.
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William Easterly (The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics)
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Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. “Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.” “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone. “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out.
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Neal Stephenson (Anathem)
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These days, writing is a team effort. The traditional image of a writer is of a rather solitary figure, but the reality is that technical writing is now often a highly collaborative process. Don’t be surprised if you end up more in the role of an editor rather than a writer – collating, assembling and editing chunks of documentation from subject matter experts into a coherent whole. That’s fine – you’re writing a technical document, not a novel!
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Kieran Morgan (Technical Writing Process: The simple, five-step guide that anyone can use to create technical documents such as user guides, manuals, and procedures)
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Take a look at your calendar and write down your role in meetings. This goes for explicit roles, like owning a meeting’s agenda, and also for more nuanced roles, like being the first person to champion others’ ideas, or the person who is diplomatic enough to raise difficult concerns. Take a second pass on your calendar for non-meeting stuff, like interviewing and closing candidates. Look back over the past six months for recurring processes, like roadmap planning, performance calibrations, or head count decisions, and document your role17 in each of those processes. For each of the individuals you support, in which areas are your skills and actions most complementary to theirs? How do you help them? What do they rely on you for? Maybe it’s authorization, advice navigating the organization, or experience in the technical domain. Audit inbound chats and emails for requests and questions coming your way. If you keep a to-do list, look at the categories of the work you’ve completed over the past six months, as well as the stuff you’ve been wanting to do but keep putting off. Think through the external relationships that have been important for you in your current role. What kinds of folks have been important, and who are the strategic partners that someone needs to know?
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Will Larson (An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management)
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Thus, multiple regression requires two important tasks: (1) specification of independent variables and (2) testing of the error term. An important difference between simple regression and multiple regression is the interpretation of the regression coefficients in multiple regression (b1, b2, b3, …) in the preceding multiple regression model. Although multiple regression produces the same basic statistics discussed in Chapter 14 (see Table 14.1), each of the regression coefficients is interpreted as its effect on the dependent variable, controlled for the effects of all of the other independent variables included in the regression. This phrase is used frequently when explaining multiple regression results. In our example, the regression coefficient b1 shows the effect of x1 on y, controlled for all other variables included in the model. Regression coefficient b2 shows the effect of x2 on y, also controlled for all other variables in the model, including x1. Multiple regression is indeed an important and relatively simple way of taking control variables into account (and much easier than the approach shown in Appendix 10.1). Key Point The regression coefficient is the effect on the dependent variable, controlled for all other independent variables in the model. Note also that the model given here is very different from estimating separate simple regression models for each of the independent variables. The regression coefficients in simple regression do not control for other independent variables, because they are not in the model. The word independent also means that each independent variable should be relatively unaffected by other independent variables in the model. To ensure that independent variables are indeed independent, it is useful to think of the distinctively different types (or categories) of factors that affect a dependent variable. This was the approach taken in the preceding example. There is also a statistical reason for ensuring that independent variables are as independent as possible. When two independent variables are highly correlated with each other (r2 > .60), it sometimes becomes statistically impossible to distinguish the effect of each independent variable on the dependent variable, controlled for the other. The variables are statistically too similar to discern disparate effects. This problem is called multicollinearity and is discussed later in this chapter. This problem is avoided by choosing independent variables that are not highly correlated with each other. A WORKING EXAMPLE Previously (see Chapter 14), the management analyst with the Department of Defense found a statistically significant relationship between teamwork and perceived facility productivity (p <.01). The analyst now wishes to examine whether the impact of teamwork on productivity is robust when controlled for other factors that also affect productivity. This interest is heightened by the low R-square (R2 = 0.074) in Table 14.1, suggesting a weak relationship between teamwork and perceived productivity. A multiple regression model is specified to include the effects of other factors that affect perceived productivity. Thinking about other categories of variables that could affect productivity, the analyst hypothesizes the following: (1) the extent to which employees have adequate technical knowledge to do their jobs, (2) perceptions of having adequate authority to do one’s job well (for example, decision-making flexibility), (3) perceptions that rewards and recognition are distributed fairly (always important for motivation), and (4) the number of sick days. Various items from the employee survey are used to measure these concepts (as discussed in the workbook documentation for the Productivity dataset). After including these factors as additional independent variables, the result shown in Table 15.1 is
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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Skills Mistakes: Leadership Too Weak, Communication Too Poor Undervaluing and underinvesting in the human side of innovation is another common mistake. Top managers frequently put the best technical people in charge, not the best leaders. These technically oriented managers, in turn, mistakenly assume that ideas will speak for themselves if they are any good, so they neglect external communication. Or they emphasize tasks over relationships, missing opportunities to enhance the team chemistry necessary to turn undeveloped concepts into useful innovations. Groups that are convened without attention to interpersonal skills find it difficult to embrace collective goals, take advantage of the different strengths various members bring, or communicate well enough to share the tacit knowledge that is still unformed and hard to document while an innovation is under development. It takes time to build the trust and interplay among team members that will spark great ideas. MIT researchers have found that for R&D team members to be truly productive, they have to have been on board for at least two years. At one point, Pillsbury realized that the average length of time the company took to go from new product idea to successful commercialization was 24 to 26 months, but the average length of time people spent on product teams was 18 months. No wonder the company was falling behind in innovation.
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Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
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Too often, however, these passing modes of relief proved insufficient. Among the all-too-scanty literary documents as yet unearthed, two dialogues on suicide significantly remain, one Egyptian and one Mesopotamian. In each case a member of the privileged classes, with every luxury and sensual gratification open to him, finds his life intolerable. His facile dreams are unsalted by reality. The Egyptian debate between a man and his soul dates from the period following the disintegration of the Pyramid Age, and betrays the desperation of an upper-class person who had lost faith in the ritualistic exaltation of death as the ultimate fulfillment of life, which rationalized the irrationalities of high Egyptian society. But the Mesopotamian dialogue between a rich master and his slave, dating from the first Millenium B.C., is even more significant: for the principal finds that no piling up of wealth, power, or sexual pleasure produces a meaningful life. Another seventh-century B.C. 'Dialogue About Human Misery' expands the theme: the fact that it has been called a Babylonian Ecclesiastes indicates the depth of its pessimism-the bitterness of power unrelieved by love, the emptiness of wealth condemned to enjoy only the goods that money can buy.
If this is what the favored few could expect, in justification of thousands of years of arduous collective effort and sacrifice, it is obvious that the cult of power, from the beginning, was based upon a gross fallacy. Ultimately the end product proved as life-defeating for the master classes as the mechanism itself was for the disinherited and socially dismembered workers and slaves.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
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Despite thorough testing, good documentation, and solid automation, things go wrong. Deliveries are late. Unforeseen technical problems come up.
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Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer)
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You have a job, so it s an individual fashion experts correctly arrested and drugs leads to the prohibition of alcohol, you can count on to symbolize the imprisonment of offenders. DUI attorney activity, of course, left processed Depending on the circumstances of the mother, yet can be challenging, it seems less complicated.
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Counsel further in the direction of a person with the effect is related to a clear penalty. This transformation actually recorded during the experiment on their own, depending on the direction is probably to show what has been done. Major customers fully understand the technical inner courtyard. These people are working for a few weeks of study; you can organize a series of public hearings. The long years you may be disappointed, upset. Criminal matter while showing visitors the direction services.
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CriminaloffenseBoa
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In the algorithms of its proprietary systems, the company has recorded all its technical investment knowledge—a set of principles to guide investing. As many as 98 percent of Bridgewater’s financial decisions are executed automatically based on that set of codified market decision rules. In contrast, the “Principles” document—the Bridgewater constitution, which all citizens of the company seek to uphold (or “fight like hell” to change, if they disagree)—is not about the laws of finance, the market economy, or investing. Instead, it’s about the ways people act to foster and preserve a culture of truth and transparency. The principles set a clear bar of excellence for all decision making and are the common textual and conceptual reference for every Bridgewater employee seeking to act in a principled way.
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Robert Kegan (An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization)
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Organizer—Using work breakdown, estimating, and scheduling techniques, determines the complete work effort for the project, the proper sequence of the work activities, when the work will be accomplished, who will do the work, and how much the work will cost. • Point Man—Serves as the central point-of-contact for all oral and written project communications. • Quartermaster—Ensures the project has the resources, materials, and facilities its needs when it needs it. • Facilitator—Ensures that stakeholders and team members who come from different perspectives understand each other and work together to accomplish the project goals. • Persuader—Gains agreement from the stakeholders on project definition, success criteria, and approach; manages stakeholder expectations throughout the project while managing the competing demands of time, cost, and quality; and gains agreement on resource decisions and issue resolution action steps. • Problem Solver—Utilizes root-cause analysis process experience, prior project experiences, and technical knowledge to resolve unforeseen technical issues and to take any necessary corrective actions. • Umbrella—Works to shield the project team from the politics and “noise” surrounding the project, so they can stay focused and productive. • Coach—Determines and communicates the role each team member plays and the importance of that role to the project success, finds ways to motivate each team member, looks for ways to improve the skills of each team member, and provides constructive and timely feedback on individual performances. • Bulldog—Performs the follow-up to ensure that commitments are maintained, issues are resolved, and action items are completed. • Librarian—Manages all information, communications, and documentation involved in the project.
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Anonymous
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Early in her career, Muse engaged her skills for technical purposes, such as document translation and schematic visualizations for government entities. She continued to write and paint poetically, in secret, using her pen name, Muse. An inner compass is evident in her work. Pieces reflect both past and present dilemmas; while showcasing her victories in overcoming these obstacles ~ all from her faith based perspective. Light touches of modernism play hand in hand with old world strokes, offering highly visceral readings.
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Earl M. Coleman
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Guideline #5: Select your vocabulary with meticulous care. Did you increase sales or orchestrate explosive growth in revenues? Did you provide good levels of customer service or unparalleled levels of quality customer service? As a receptionist, did you merely greet people, or were you the manager of first impressions? Are you a good problem solver, or can you resolve complex technical issues professionally and expeditiously? Words are power, and keywords and phrases are powerful agents for eliciting the right emotions to enthusiastically engage prospective employers to want to read your document. Well-chosen words can be the difference between an interview and a missed opportunity, so select your words and messages with painstaking precision.
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Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
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In exchange for $10 million, the Iranians walked away with two large suitcases and two briefcases filled with everything they needed to kick-start a uranium enrichment program—technical designs for making centrifuges, a couple of disassembled centrifuge prototypes, and a drawing for the layout of a small centrifuge plant containing six cascades.25 Apparently as a bonus, the marketeers threw in a fifteen-page document describing how to turn enriched uranium into uranium metal and cast it into “hemispheres,” the core component of nuclear bombs.
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Anonymous
“
Delgamuukw involved two bands of the Skeena region in northwest British Columbia. They wanted to challenge the governmental and legal assumptions about land ownership. The case began in 1984 and ended at the Supreme Court in 1997. The two bands did not win ownership. However, they brought the standard European-derived assumptions about the nature of ownership to a halt and opened the way for what might be fair negotiations. What is fascinating is that the government had all the written documentation it needed to win. But the court, led by Chief Justice Antonio Lamer, turned them back. The Gitxsan and the Wet’suwet’en Nations had put forward an argument of oral memory in order to prove the land was theirs. They argued that oral memory is perfectly accurate, as it is passed on from one generation to the next via individuals charged with remembering, and with doing so accurately through a formalized process. As in the Guerin decision, the Court chose to base its decision on principles far more important than any technical argument coming out of the Western tradition. The result was one of the most important rulings in the history of Canada. Alongside written proof, the Court would give equal place – and in this case what amounted to precedence – to oral memory. This argument for orality carries all of us out of the universal European narrative. In the chief justice’s eloquent judgment, he said that oral histories would be “admitted for their truth,” that the laws of evidence must therefore be adapted, that “in the circumstances, the factual findings [of the government] cannot stand.” His concluding sentences were a call for negotiations to achieve something that I can only imagine happening through a spatial approach: “… the reconciliation of the pre-existence of Aboriginal societies with the sovereignty of the Crown. Let us face it, we are all here to stay.” The crisis of 2012–2013 is a depressing reminder that the governments of Canada – federal and provincial – have stubbornly refused to accept this Supreme Court recommendation. But at least the rules are there, carefully argued and laid out, constantly repeated and developed
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John Ralston Saul (The Comeback: How Aboriginals Are Reclaiming Power And Influence)
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An 11th U-boat, U-234, turned for America following the German surrender, yielding the to Americans and providing them with a full cargo of technical documents, as well as 7.7 lbs of uranium-235, which likely ended up at the Manhattan Project's Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee. Thus, some of the products of Third Reich science ended up being used directly against their ally Japan prior to its surrender.
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Charles River Editors (Operation Paperclip: The History of the Secret Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America During and After World War II)
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Any cryptoasset worth its mustard has an origination white paper. A white paper is a document that’s often used in business to outline a proposal, typically written by a thought leader or someone knowledgeable on a topic. As it relates to cryptoassets, a white paper is the stake in the ground, outlining the problem the asset addresses, where the asset stands in the competitive landscape, and what the technical details are.
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Chris Burniske (Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond)
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Fuchs’s transfer of scientific secrets to the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1943 was one of the most concentrated spy hauls in history, some 570 pages of copied reports, calculations, drawings, formulae and diagrams, the designs for uranium enrichment, a step-by-step guide to the fast-moving development of the atomic weapon. Much of this material was too complex and technical to be coded and sent by radio, and so Ursula passed the documents to Sergei through a “brush contact,” a surreptitious handover imperceptible to a casual observer. If Ursula needed to pass on urgent information, or bulky files, she alerted Aptekar by means of an agreed “signal site”: “I had to travel to London and, at a certain time and in a certain place, drop a small piece of chalk and tread on it.” Two days later she would cycle to the rendezvous site, a side road six miles beyond the junction of the A40 and A34 on the road from Oxford to Cheltenham; Aptekar would drive from London in the military attaché’s car and arrive at the pickup site at an appointed time for a swift handover. At one of these meetings, the Soviet officer presented her with a new Minox camera for making microdots and copying documents, and a small but powerful transmitter measuring just six by eight inches, a sixth of the size of her homemade radio and easier to conceal. She dismantled her own equipment, but kept it in reserve “for emergency use.” Fuchs was privy to the innermost workings of the atomic project and he held nothing back. In the first year, he and Peierls wrote no fewer than eleven reports together, including seminal papers on isotope separation and calculating the destructive power of
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Ben Macintyre (Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy)
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Key features Always write in small chunks (also-called blocks ). Unlike many paragraphs, only one topic per chunk. Nothing extra. Chunks can contain several sentences. Label very chunk with an informative, relevant, short, bold-face title. Standards for organizing and sequencing large documents. Diagrams and illustrations can be chunks. Use them. Possible to cluster most of the 40 sentence types into seven categories: procedure, process, structure, concept, fact, classification, principle. Another 160 chunk-types available for Report Documents and Scientific and Technical Reports. About 400,000 technical and business writers world-wide have been taught to write structured writing since 1969.
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Frode Hegland (The Future of Text 1)
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They were productively adversarial, like superforecasting team discussions. Managers grilled engineers and forced them to produce data to back up their assertions. The process had worked remarkably. The space shuttle was the most complex machine ever built, and all twenty-four flights had returned safely. But on the emergency conference call, that same quantitative culture led them astray. On their engineers’ advice, McDonald and two Thiokol VPs on the call initially supported a no-launch decision. The Challenger had already been cleared, so this was an eleventh-hour reversal. When NASA officials asked Thiokol engineers exactly what temperature range was safe for flight, they recommended setting a limit at 53 degrees, the lower bound of previous experience. NASA manager Larry Mulloy was flabbergasted. He thought the shuttle was supposed to be cleared to launch from 31 to 99 degrees. A last-minute 53-degree limit was setting an entirely new technical criteria for launches. It had never been discussed, was not backed by quantitative data, and meant that suddenly winter was off-limits for space exploration. Mulloy found it frustrating; he later called it “dumb.” How had the engineers arrived at that number? “They said because they had flown at 53 degrees before,” a NASA manager reflected, “which is no reason to me. That’s tradition rather than technology.” Boisjoly was asked again for data to support his claim, “and I said I have none other than what is being presented.” With the conference call at an impasse, a Thiokol VP asked for a five-minute “offline caucus,” during which Thiokol concluded that they had no more data to provide. They returned to the call a half hour later with a new decision: proceed with launch. Their official document read, “temperature data not conclusive on predicting primary O-ring blow-by.” When conference call participants from NASA and Thiokol later spoke with investigators and gave interviews, they repeatedly brought up the “weak engineering position,” as one put it. Their statements comprised a repetitive chorus: “Unable to quantify”; “supporting data was subjective”; “hadn’t done a good technical job”; “just didn’t have enough conclusive data.” NASA was, after all, the agency that hung a framed quote in the Mission Evaluation Room: “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
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Difficulties of technical translation: features, problems, rules
Technical translation is one of the most important areas of written translation in modern translation practice. Like the interpretation technique, it has its own characteristics and requirements. The need for this type of work is due to economic and scientific and technical progress, as well as the development of international relations. Thanks to technical translation, people share experience, knowledge and developments in various fields. What are the features of this type of translation? What pitfalls can be encountered on the translator's path? You will learn about this and much more from our article.
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Technical translation is one of the most difficult types of legal translation. This is due to the large number of requirements for such work. Technical translation includes all scientific and technical texts, documents, instructions, reports, reference books and dictionaries. The texts of this plan contain a lot of specific terminology, which is the main difficulty of technical translation. A term is a word or a combination of words that accurately names a phenomenon, subject or scientific concept, revealing its meaning as much as possible. The most common technical texts in the following areas:
• engineering;
• defense;
• physics and mathematics;
• aircraft construction;
• oil industry;
• shipbuilding, etc.
The main feature of technical translation is the requirement for its high accuracy (equivalence). The task of the translator is to convey information as close as possible to the original. Otherwise, distortions may appear in the text, leading to a misunderstanding of important information. Vocabulary selection is carried out carefully and carefully. The construction of phrases should be logical and meaningful. Other technical translation requirements include adequacy and informativeness. It is equally important to maintain the style of such texts. This includes not only vocabulary, but also the grammatical structure of the text, as well as the way the material is presented. Most often, this is a formal and logical style.
Unlike artistic translation, where the main task is to convey the content, and the translator can use his imagination, include fancy turns and various figures of speech, the presence of emotionality and subjectivity is unacceptable in technical translation.
Let's consider the peculiarities of technical translation in English. According to the well-known linguist and translator Y. Y. Retsker, English technical literature is characterized by the predominant use of complex or complex sentences, which include adjectives, nouns, as well as impersonal forms of verbs (infinitives, gerundial inflections, etc.). Passive constructions are also often found. In this direction, it is permissible to use only generally accepted grammatical structures. Another feature of such texts may be the absence of a predicate or subject and a large number of enumerations. In addition, the finished text should have an appropriate layout equivalent to the original. Let's consider the basic rules of technical translation for a specialist:
• knowledge of the vocabulary, grammar and word structure of the foreign language from which the translation is performed (at the level required for understanding the source text);
• knowledge of the language into which the translation is performed (at a level sufficient for a competent presentation of the material);
• excellent knowledge of the specifics of texts and terminology;
• ability to use linguistic and technical sources of information;
• familiarity with the specifics of the field
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Tim David
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Product: •What is the product? •Who is it for? •What does it do? •How does it work? •How do people buy and use it? Benefits: •How does the product help people? •What are its most important benefits? Reader: •Who are you writing for? •How do they live? •What do they want? •What do they feel? •What do they know about the product, or this type of product? •Are they using a similar product already? Aim: •What do you want the reader to do, think or feel as a result of reading this copy? •What situation will they be in when they read it? Format: •Where will the copy be used? (Sales letter, web page, YouTube video, etc) •How long does it need to be? (500 words, 10 pages, 30 seconds, etc) •How should it be structured? (Main title, subtitles, sidebars, pullout quotes, calls to action, etc) •What other types of content might be involved? (Images, diagrams, video, music, etc) Tone: •Should the copy be serious, light-hearted, emotional, energetic, laid-back, etc? Constraints: •Maximum or minimum length •Anything that must be included or left out •Legal issues (regulations on scientific or health claims, prohibited words, trademarks, etc) •How this copy needs to fit in with other copy that’s already been written, or that will be written in the future •Whether the copy will form part of a campaign, so that different ideas along the same lines will be needed in future (see ‘Take it further’ in chapter 9) •Which countries the copy will appear in (whether in English, or translated) •SEO issues (for example, popular search terms that should feature in headings) •Brand or tone of voice guidelines (see ‘Tone of voice guidelines’ in chapter 15) Other background information about: •The product (development history, use cases, technical specifications, distribution, retail, buying processes, buying channels, marketing strategy) •The product’s market position (price point, offers and discounts, customer perceptions, competitors) •The target market (size, history, typical customer profile, marketing personas) •The client (history, current setup, culture, people, values) •The brand (history, positioning, values) Project management points: •Timescales (dates for copy plan, drafts, feedback, final copy, approval) •Who will provide feedback, and how •Who will approve the final copy, and how •How the copy will be delivered (usually a Word document, but not always) These are only suggestions.
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Tom Albrighton (Copywriting Made Simple: How to write powerful and persuasive copy that sells (The Freelance Writer's Starter Kit))
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Like all writers, technical writers aim to produce content that their intended audiences will read and find useful.1 This has to be the goal, because any other goal is absurd.
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Andrew Etter (Modern Technical Writing: An Introduction to Software Documentation)
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Cloud Service
Any service made available to users on demand via the Internet from a cloud computing provider's servers rather than from a company's own on-premises servers is referred to as a cloud service. Cloud services are managed by a cloud services provider and are designed to enable easy, scalable access to applications, resources, and services.
CLOUD SERVICES ARE SCALABLE AND DYNAMIC.
A cloud service may dynamically scale to meet the needs of its customers, and because the service provider provides all of the necessary hardware and software, a corporation does not need to provision or deploy its own resources or dedicate IT people to operate the service. Online data storage and backup solutions, Web-based e-mail services, hosted office suites and document collaboration services, database processing, managed technical support services, and more are all examples of cloud services.
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Crafsol Technology
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Cosgrove advocates treating all plans, milestones, and schedules as tentative, so as to facilitate change. This goes much too far—the common failing of programming groups today is too little management control, not too much. Nevertheless, he offers a great insight. He observes that the reluctance to document designs is not due merely to laziness or time pressure. Instead it comes from the designer's reluctance to commit himself to the defense of decisions which he knows to be tentative. "By documenting a design, the designer exposes himself to the criticisms of everyone, and he must be able to defend everything he writes. If the organizational structure is threatening in any way, nothing is going to be documented until it is completely defensible." Structuring an organization for change is much harder than designing a system for change. Each man must be assigned to jobs that broaden him, so that the whole force is technically flexible. On a large project the manager needs to keep two or three top programmers as a technical cavalry that can gallop to the rescue wherever the battle is thickest. Management structures also need to be changed as the system changes. This means that the boss must give a great deal of attention to keeping his managers and his technical people as interchangeable as their talents allow.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
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Candid photography has taken the world by storm, and Hyderabad, with its vibrant culture and rich traditions, is no exception. In a city where every corner seems to have a story to tell, candid photographers in Hyderabad play a crucial role in capturing the moments that often go unnoticed.
Candid photograper in Hyderabad has become immensely popular in recent years, and Hyderabad is no stranger to this trend. The allure of candid photography lies in its ability to capture genuine, unscripted moments. Unlike traditional posed photography, candid photography aims to document the raw emotions and authentic interactions that occur during events, such as weddings, parties, and cultural celebrations.
Hyderabad's rich tapestry of traditions, festivals, and cultural events provides the perfect backdrop for candid photographers to work their magic. The technical aspects of photography are equally important. Candid photographers in Hyderabad need to be proficient in handling various camera equipment, including high-quality lenses and accessories.
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chickpallavi
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The absurdity of many UFO stories and of many religious visions is not a superficial logical mistake. It may be the key to their function. According to Major Murphy, the confusion in the UFO mystery may have been put there deliberately to achieve certain results. One of these results has been to keep scientists away. The other is to create the conditions for a new form of social control, a change in Man’s perception of his place in the universe. Are his theories fantastic? Before we decide, let us review a few other facts. We need to examine more closely the political connections.
Paris Flammonde, in his well-documented Age of Flying Saucers, remarked that “a great many of the contactees purvey philosophies which are tinged, if not tainted, with totalitarian overtones.”1
A catalogue of contactee themes, compiled from interviews I have conducted, includes the following.
Intellectual abdication. The widespread belief that human beings are incapable of solving their own problems, and that extraterrestrial intervention is imperative to save us “in spite of ourselves.” The danger in such a philosophy is that it makes its believers dependent on outside forces and discourages personal responsibility: why should we worry about the problems around us, if the Gods from Outer Space are about to solve them?
Racist philosophy. The pernicious suggestion that some of us on the Earth are of extraterrestrial descent and therefore constitute a “higher race.” The dangers inherent in this belief should be obvious to anybody who hasn’t forgotten the genocides of World War II, executed on the premise that some races were somehow “purer” or better than others. (Let us note in passing that Adamski’s Venusian, the Stranger of the Canigou seen by Bordas, and many other alleged extraterrestrials were all tall Aryan types with long blond hair.)
Technical impotence. The statement that the birth of civilization on this planet resulted not from the genius and ability of mankind, but from repeated assistance by higher beings. Archaeologists and anthropologists are constantly aware of the marvelous skill with which the “Ancient Engineers” (to use L. Sprague de Camp’s phrase) developed the tools of civilization on all continents. No appeal to superior powers is necessary to explain the achievements of early culture. The belief expressed by the contactees reveals a tragic lack of trust on their part in human ability.
Social utopia. Fantastic economic theories, including the belief that a “world economy” can be created overnight, and that democracy should be abolished in favor of Utopian systems, usually dictatorial in their outlook.
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Jacques F. Vallée (Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults)
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Baby photography isn't just about documenting moments; it's about creating art. The best photographer should have a creative eye, finding unique angles and perspectives to capture the baby's beauty. Safety should be a top priority during baby photography sessions. The best baby photographer in Hyderabad must be well-versed in safety precautions to ensure that the baby is never put at risk during the shoot.
Creating stunning Best baby photography in Hyderabad requires more than just technical skill; it demands a profound dedication to the art form. A talented baby photographer in Hyderabad will invest time and effort in understanding the individual needs and preferences of each family, customizing each photo shoot to capture the unique essence of the baby.
The artistic aspect of baby photography is evident in the way a photographer composes shots, plays with lighting, and selects backgrounds and props. Each element is chosen carefully to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the images.
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chickniha
“
Candid photography has taken the world by storm, and Hyderabad, with its vibrant culture and rich traditions, is no exception. In a city where every corner seems to have a story to tell, candid photographers in Hyderabad play a crucial role in capturing the moments that often go unnoticed.
Candid photograpers in Hyderabad has become immensely popular in recent years, and Hyderabad is no stranger to this trend. The allure of candid photography lies in its ability to capture genuine, unscripted moments. Unlike traditional posed photography, candid photography aims to document the raw emotions and authentic interactions that occur during events, such as weddings, parties, and cultural celebrations.
Hyderabad's rich tapestry of traditions, festivals, and cultural events provides the perfect backdrop for candid photographers to work their magic. The technical aspects of photography are equally important. Candid photographers in Hyderabad need to be proficient in handling various camera equipment, including high-quality lenses and accessories.
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chickmanu
“
So what makes a technical writer exceptional? Resourcefulness and eagerness are essential. When you screen tech writer candidates, look for a real appetite for discovery. The job, fundamentally, isn’t about writing or learning technology. It’s a relationship business, more like investigative journalism than anything else.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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Look for someone who can write clear sentences and organize information well, but who isn’t afraid to break a rule or two when it serves to engage a modern reader.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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Let’s move beyond the stereotypes and recognize that the boundary between writers and developers is thin and permeable.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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In other words, measurement isn’t about precise counting, and measurement has to support a business decision.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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To measure success, you must decide what success means for your organization.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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The very idea of “success” is contextual. You must establish a clear definition of what constitutes success within your department and across your company. Then use measurement to reduce your uncertainty about those aspects of your success criteria that you will use to make informed decisions about what to change.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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Mark Baker, author of Every Page is Page One, says that mean time to productivity is the only true measurement of whether documentation is successful.[7
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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The faster your documentation makes your customers productive, the more successful it is.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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The classic metric for the success of technical documentation is support case deflection.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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Unfortunately, support case deflection is a surprisingly difficult metric to capture because it involves measuring an absence of action.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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The methodology they propose is to survey customers directly and ask them whether their last interaction with the company website was successful or resulted in them opening a support case. If the customer was successful and didn’t open a case, the survey would ask them to hypothesize whether they would have opened a case if they hadn’t been successful. Surveys such as these provide some useful data. But it would be difficult to make an informed business decision based on anecdotal information with such a high degree of inference.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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A group at Microsoft surveyed a significant number of Microsoft MVPs and asked them what they thought the value of the documentation was as a percentage of the price of the software.[10] The responses were entirely subjective, to be sure, but they provided compelling information that enabled that documentation group to argue for a better percentage of the engineering budget to fund their content improvement efforts.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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As you respond to requests from upper management for more metrics, make sure you are measuring intelligently. Define what’s important to your department and the company. Identify a set of business decisions you want to make. Figure out what you can measure to reduce the uncertainty involved in making those decisions.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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A well-written scenario keeps this motivation in mind and identifies product features in the context of how they solve the problem posed in the scenario.
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Christopher Gales (The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group)
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key roles played by the project manager: Planner—Ensures that the project is defined properly and completely for success, all stakeholders are engaged, work effort approach is determined, required resources are available when needed, and processes are in place to properly execute and control the project. Organizer—Using work breakdown, estimating, and scheduling techniques, determines the complete work effort for the project, the proper sequence of the work activities, when the work will be accomplished, who will do the work, and how much the work will cost. Point Person—Serves as the central point of contact for all oral and written project communications. Quartermaster—Ensures the project has the resources, materials, and facilities it needs when it needs it. Facilitator—Ensures that stakeholders and team members who come from different perspectives understand each other and work together to accomplish the project goals. Persuader—Gains agreement from the stakeholders on project definition, success criteria, and approach; manages stakeholder expectations throughout the project while managing the competing demands of time, cost, and quality; and gains agreement on resource decisions and issue resolution action steps. Problem Solver—Utilizes root-cause analysis process experience, prior project experience, and technical knowledge to resolve unforeseen technical issues and take any necessary corrective actions. Umbrella—Works to shield the project team from the politics and “noise” surrounding the project, so they can stay focused and productive. Coach—Determines and communicates the role each team member plays and the importance of that role to the project’s success, finds ways to motivate each team member, looks for ways to improve the skills of each team member, and provides constructive and timely feedback on individual performances. Bulldog—Performs the follow-up to ensure that commitments are maintained, issues are resolved, and action items are completed. Librarian—Manages all information, communications, and documentation involved in the project.
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Gregory M. Horine (Project Management Absolute Beginner's Guide)
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Here are some reasons for the software developer community to adopt "docs-as-ecosystem":
Proposes a more holistic and community-centered approach: The term "docs-as-ecosystem" recognizes that documentation is not just a set of markdown files or code snippets but an ecosystem that needs to be managed and nurtured. The term "docs-as-code" has been widely adopted recently, but it may not fully capture the complexity and diversity of documentation development. The term "docs-as-ecosystem" aligns with the industry trend towards a more holistic and community-centered approach to documentation development.
Encourages collaboration: The term "docs-as-ecosystem" acknowledges that documentation development involves different roles and stakeholders, such as technical writers, designers, developers, community members, and beyond. By adopting this term, the software developer community can encourage collaboration across diverse stakeholders and facilitate the creation of high-quality documentation.
Emphasizes the importance of retrieving and incorporating community feedback: The term "docs-as-ecosystem" highlights the importance of retrieving and integrating community feedback in documentation development. It recognizes that documentation is about providing information and meeting community needs and preferences.
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Alejandra Quetzalli (Docs-as-Ecosystem: The Community Approach to Engineering Documentation)
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WHY COMMUNITY IS MORE REPRESENTATIVE THAN “USERS”
In the traditional software development model, we're used to writing technical documentation with a specific user in mind. However, this approach can be limiting because it assumes a single "ideal" user represents your entire user base.
The docs-as-ecosystem model proposes a different way of thinking about technical documentation; it recognizes technical documentation is not just a product but an ongoing conversation between diverse documentation creators (contributors) and the community.
Thinking in terms of community has several advantages over focusing only on users:
More inclusive: Focusing on the community is more inclusive than focusing only on users because it recognizes that many different types of stakeholders contribute to and read the documentation.
More diverse: Focusing on the community encourages diversity and inclusion because it recognizes many different backgrounds and experiences.
More collaborative: Focusing on the community also fosters a more collaborative approach to documentation because it encourages anyone from any background to participate.
By focusing on community, the docs-as-ecosystem approach offers a more flexible, adaptable, and sustainable way to approach technical documentation. Rather than assuming that there is a single "ideal" user, we recognize that technical documentation is a dynamic and ongoing conversation between documentation creators and the community.
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Alejandra Quetzalli (Docs-as-Ecosystem: The Community Approach to Engineering Documentation)
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Far more than just a technical document, the Report on Manufactures was a prescient statement of American nationalism.
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Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
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Consider the following statements from two hypothetical technical writers: "In my professional opinion, the content is clear, concise, correct, and complete. The language is professional, conforms to our style guide, and projects a strong brand. Some of the tables were too wide for print, so we now enforce a two-column limit on all tables. Overall, I'm happy with the quality of the documentation." "The application logs show that the product only has 1,300 users, yet the documentation received 2,400 page views last month. In that same timespan, readers reported six inaccuracies, all of which I resolved within 72 hours. The five most popular search terms return the pages I would expect, and the design team recently helped me optimize the header margins for readability. Overall, I'm happy with the quality of the documentation." I sincerely hope that you find the second argument more compelling. In any field, opinions become more credible when you attach quantitative metrics to them. Documentation is no different.
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Andrew Etter (Modern Technical Writing: An Introduction to Software Documentation)
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Great documentation makes new hires productive in days instead of weeks, prevents thousands of calls to customer support, is the difference between crippling downtime and rock solid stability, and inspires true, fervent love of development platforms.
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Andrew Etter (Modern Technical Writing: An Introduction to Software Documentation)
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Examine Analyze Compile Draft Edit Supervise Manage Oversee Assemble (exhibits for witness interview of . . . ) Address and resolve (technical issues in document review platform with vendor) Track (status of ongoing review projects or discovery work streams) Strategic discussion Tactical discussion Assist (with the deposition/interview/preparation of . . . ) Prepare Provide (feedback for staff attorneys for quality control) Finalize Build (list of key employees) Create (case chronology timeline; tracking spreadsheet of ongoing work flow and research assignments, etc.) Summarize Submit Assess (litigation strategy for client presentation) File (motion to dismiss . . . ) Participate (in client conference) Update Confer Notice two verbs that I did not include in the list: Review and Code. I never use these words. Biglaw associates do not review and code documents. That
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Sarah Powell (Biglaw: How to Survive the First Two Years of Practice in a Mega-Firm, or, The Art of Doc Review)
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Grinding may look easy, and it is, for the first ten minutes. To grind a quantity of grain, though, as I found out when I tried, takes skill, control, physical strength, and time. I was quickly panting, sweaty, and dizzy, my hair in my eyes, and the mano slipping at awkward angles. Grinding is hard on the knees, hips, back, shoulders, and elbows, causing arthritis and bone damage. Grinding is lonely, too exhausting to allow for chatter. Kneeling to grind with the breasts swinging can be seen as submissive, demeaning, and sexually provocative, as lascivious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations of Mexican women grinding make clear. The heavy labor was relegated to women, convicts, and slaves, called “grinding slaves” in the technical language of seventh-century English court documents.42 Even today Mexican women in remote villages grind five hours daily to prepare enough maize for a family of five or six. For generation upon generation of grinders in the bread-eating parts of the world, the author of Genesis (3:19) had it nailed. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
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Rachel Laudan (Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (California Studies in Food and Culture Book 43))
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The missing crew manifest is evidence that a major and well-designed plot involving this submarine was underway. Communist bureaucrats were efficient to a fault when it came to keeping lists of names. Even if technical equipment and other systems were prone to break down, certain procedures did not. Soviet submarine commanders were particularly careful about filing this document before sailing. Thus, no other conclusion can be drawn than that someone with extraordinary power had deliberately circumvented important personnel procedures that were sacrosanct to the Soviet submarine service.
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Kenneth Sewell (Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.)