The X Factor Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to The X Factor. Here they are! All 99 of them:

Why did the mushroom go to the party? Because he's a fungi!
One Direction (One Direction: Forever Young: Our Official X Factor Story)
Cause I'm Irish, and everyone remembers me.
Niall Horan (One Direction: Forever Young: Our Official X Factor Story)
here once was a group with Liam and Niall Vas happenin’ boys? Vas happenin’ boys? They lived with Zayn and his room was vile Vas happenin’ boys? Vas happenin’ boys? Did you know Harry’s such a slob? He needs to win X-factor ‘cause he can’t get a job And oh Louis needs a boat He dresses like he owns one ‘Cause he’s got no other clothes They really need your vote Vas happenin’ boys? Vas happenin’ boys? Mick Jagger could be Harry’s dad Vas happenin’ mum? Vas happenin’ Mick? When Liam sings he makes his face look sad Vas happenin’ song? Vas happenin’ sad? And Zayn’s the master of echos And Niall was raised by leprechauns So he won’t ever grow And oh Louis needs that boat He dresses like he owns one And it’s becoming a joke They really need your vote Vas happenin’ boys? Vas happenin’ boys? Vas happenin’ boys? Vas happenin’ boys? Vas happenin’ boys? Vas happenin’ boys?
One Direction
Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an x-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
The primary reason we do too much is that we have never taken the time to discover that portion of what we do that makes the biggest difference.
Andy Stanley (Next Generation Leader: 5 Essentials for Those Who Will Shape the Future)
There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.
Peter David (X-Factor, Vol. 6: Secret Invasion)
Last she knew, she was swooning at Akshay’s fluidic dance moves. Well, it was time to get involved. She knew Saurav was good for her, but she found the unpredictability of Akshay a bit of the X-factor.
Kumar Kinshuk (Ritualistic Murder (The Kanke Killings Trilogy #0))
Believing in yourself...is always the X factor in the equation of achieving greatness!
Timothy Pina (Hearts for Haiti: Book of Poetry & Inspiration)
Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge. But there is another element, an X factor that Masters inevitably possess, that seems mystical but that is accessible to us all. Whatever field of activity we are involved in, there is generally an accepted path to the top. It is a path that others followed, and because we are conformist creatures, most of us opt for this conventional route. But Masters have a strong inner guiding system and a high level of self-awareness. What has suited others in the past does not suit them, and they know that trying to fit into a conventional mold would only lead to a dampening of spirit, the reality they seek eluding them. And so inevitably, these Masters, as they progress on their career paths, make a choice at a key moment in their lives: they decide to forge their own route, one that others will see as unconventional, but that suits their own spirit and rhythms and leads them closer to discovering the hidden truths of their objects of study. This key choice takes self-confidence and self-awarenes–the X factor that is necessary for attaining mastery...
Robert Greene (Mastery)
Why is this interesting? Why are we watching?
Kae Tempest (Brand New Ancients: A Poem)
Disciplined, consistent, and persistent actions are more of a determining factor in the creation of success than any other combination of things.
Grant Cardone (The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure)
I swear to God the woman sang the whole song, to my face. It was just so awkward, and every time I stood next to her she started singing it again. I thought how that would be like me going up to Britney and singing the whole of 'Baby One More Time' in her face. Can you imagine how weird that would be?
Cheryl Cole (Cheryl: My Story)
Oh<" said American Stepmom, nodding fast, her flying squirrel hoodie nodding one second slower than her head. "Yes, yes, of course. But What if the X factor starts to dance the electric bugaloo with my sonic screwdriver and I get sent back to ancient Egypt?
Carlos Hernandez (Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe (Sal and Gabi, #2))
Cancer researchers knew that X-rays, soot, cigarette smoke, and asbestos represented vastly more common risk factors for human cancers.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
Errors of reductionism and biodeterminism take over in such silly statements as “Intelligence is 60 percent genetic and 40 percent environmental.” A 60 percent (or whatever) “heritability” for intelligence means no such thing. We shall not get this issue straight until we realize that the “interactionism” we all accept does not permit such statements as “Trait x is 29 percent environmental and 71 percent genetic.” When causative factors (more than two, by the way) interact so complexly, and throughout growth, to produce an intricate adult being, we cannot, in principle, parse that being’s behavior into quantitative percentages of remote root causes. The adult being is an emergent entity who must be understood at his own level and in his own totality. The truly salient issues are malleability and flexibility, not fallacious parsing by percentages. A trait may be 90 percent heritable, yet entirely malleable.
Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man)
Staying put was out of the question. A hotel? But this was London, a city with more cameras than pigeons, and the Service had access to any CCTV system they chose. Showing his face in a hotel lobby would be as discreet as popping up on The X Factor. Leaving town was a better bet, but he couldn’t use his car . . .
Mick Herron (Slough House (Slough House #7))
Another person normal does not mean it's your ideal normal.
Runa Magnus (Branding Your X-Factor: How the Secret to Success is Already In Front of Your...)
Psychotherapy is like an equation with two unknowns—Psi equals x plus y. The one unknown is that ever variable and incalculable factor, the personality of the Doctor, and the other unknown is the individuality of the patient.
Viktor E. Frankl (The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy)
In 1996, when two-thirds of the crack users were White or Latina/o, 84.5 percent of the defendants convicted of crack possession were Black. Even without the crucial factor of racial profiling of Blacks as drug dealers and users by the police, a general rule applied that still applies today: wherever there are more police, there are more arrests, and wherever there are more arrests, people perceive there is more crime, which then justifies more police, and more arrests, and supposedly more crime.24
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
Another example of their hatefulness while my dander’s up: in order to get themselves off the hook of sometimes liking uncool things, they refer to them as ‘guilty pleasures’, which is a ridiculous expression. What? So you like Abba, or Roger Moore as James Bond, but have been led to believe that this taste is somehow infra dig, so you style it a ‘guilty pleasure’, thus demonstrating you’re sufficiently relaxed and self-deprecating to own up to it – when in fact the way you have chosen to express it lays bare your bland and inane obsession with the worthless trappings of the zeitgeist. ‘Guilty pleasures’? It’s prudish and judgemental and yet it’s referring to harmless things people do in their spare time. I mean, I’ve watched and enjoyed The X Factor and I know that it’s not exactly the Proms or The Wire or whatever worthy thing I’m supposed to be watching, but why should I feel the least bit guilty about having taken pleasure from it? Or, for that matter, from eating a Findus crispy pancake, watching a Brittas Empire DVD or reading Country Life in the bath?
David Mitchell (Back Story)
The form the picture had taken was not unreservedly welcome to the patient’s conscious mind. Luckily, however, while painting it Miss X had discovered that two factors were involved. These, in her own words, were reason and the eyes. Reason always wanted to make the picture as it thought it ought to be; but the eyes held fast to their vision and finally forced the picture to come out as it actually did and not in accordance with rationalistic expectations. Her reason, she said, had really intended a daylight scene, with the sunshine melting the sphere free, but the eyes favoured a nocturne with “shattering, dangerous lightning.” This realization helped her to acknowledge the actual result of her artistic efforts and to admit that it was in fact an objective and impersonal process and not a personal relationship.
C.G. Jung (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works, Vol 9i))
The first flight of a previously flown booster came a month later on a launch also from 39A. After the launch, an emotional Musk called it “an incredible milestone in the history of space,” one that SpaceX had been working toward for fifteen years. This, he said, would be what would ultimately lower the cost of spaceflight, perhaps by a factor of a hundred or more—“the key to opening up space, and becoming a spacefaring civilization, a multiplanetary species and having the future be incredibly exciting and inspiring.
Christian Davenport (The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos)
Good things don't happen to victims; bad things do—quite frequently—and all you have to do is ask them. Those who embrace the victim position will gladly go on and on to you about how they had nothing to do with their many bad breaks and misfortunes in life that seem to strike them time and again throughout their lives. There are four consistent factors in the life of the victim: (1) bad things happen to them, (2) bad things happen often, (3) they are always involved, and (4) someone or something else is always to blame.
Grant Cardone (The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure)
Security is a big and serious deal, but it’s also largely a solved problem. That’s why the average person is quite willing to do their banking online and why nobody is afraid of entering their credit card number on Amazon. At 37signals, we’ve devised a simple security checklist all employees must follow: 1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to think of these tools as something for the home, but inevitably you’ll check your work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.§ We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C28Z, it’s no good if it’s used on every site and one of them is hacked. (It happens all the time!) 6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to. Creating security protocols and algorithms is the computer equivalent of rocket science, but taking advantage of them isn’t. Take the time to learn the basics and they’ll cease being scary voodoo that you can’t trust. These days, security for your devices is just simple good sense, like putting on your seat belt.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
Science is a time machine, and it goes both ways. We are able to predict our future with increasing certainty. Our ability to act in response to these predictions will ultimately determine our fate. Science and reason make the darkness visible. I worry that lack of investment in science and a retreat from reason may prevent us from seeing further, or delay our reaction to what we see, making a meaningful response impossible. There are no simple fixes. Our civilisation is complex, our global political system is inadequate, our internal differences of opinion are deep-seated. I’d bet you think you’re absolutely right about some things and virtually everyone else is an idiot. Climate Change? Europe? God? America? The Monarchy? Same-sex Marriage? Abortion? Big Business? Nationalism? The United Nations? The Bank Bailout? Tax Rates? Genetically Modified Crops? Eating Meat? Football? X Factor or Strictly? The way forward is to understand and accept that there are many opinions, but only one human civilisation, only one Nature, and only one science. The collective goal of ensuring that there is never less than one human civilisation must surely override our personal prejudices. At least we have come far enough in 40,800 years to be able to state the obvious, and this is a necessary first step.
Brian Cox (Human Universe)
A diet rich in readily available nutrients allows the bones to mineralize properly, particularly during gestation and early development, and gives the teeth immunity to decay throughout the stresses of life. Not surprisingly, he found that the native diets that conferred such good health on healthy, so-called primitive groups were rich in minerals, particularly calcium and phosphorus, necessary for healthy bones and teeth. What is surprising about the work of Weston Price is his discovery that these healthy diets always contained a good source of what he called "fat-soluble activators," nutrients like vitamin A and vitamin D, and another vitamin he discovered called Activator X or the Price Factor. These nutrients are found only in certain animal fats. Foods that provided these nutrients were considered sacred by the healthy groups he studied. These foods included liver and other organ meats from grazing animals; fish eggs; fish liver oils; fish and shellfish; and butter from cows eating rapidly growing green grass from well-mineralized pastures. Price concluded that without a rich supply of these fat-soluble nutrients, the body cannot properly use the minerals in food. These fat-soluble nutrients also nourish the glands and organs to give healthy indigenous peoples plenty of immunity during times of stress.
Thomas S. Cowan (Fourfold Path To Healing: Working with the Laws of Nutrition, Therapeutics, Movement and Meditation in the Art of Medicine)
The one thing Dante never considered is that hell would be a place that the overwhelming majority LOVE. American Idol and X-Factor - these are programmes created by the elite to provide “bread and circuses” to the masses, and how the masses flock to the Colosseum. What they haven’t realised - because they’re too stupid - is that they’re the “Christians” being fed to the lions. They’re watching the annihilation of their hopes of a good life, and yet they’re laughing and cheering! That demonstrates the extent of the elite’s mind control over them. Every second you spend watching junk TV is a wasted second, and if you watch a huge amount of shit, you’ve wasted your life.
Adam Weishaupt (The Illuminati Manifesto)
In the 21st century, infant and child mortality is lower, education takes longer, and people live longer and healthier lives. In this environment, the risk of death is lower, but the danger of falling behind economically is higher in an age of income inequality, so parents choose to have fewer children and nurture them more extensively. As an academic paper put it, “When competition for resources is high in stable environments, selection favors greater parental investment and a reduced number of offspring.” This is a good description of the U.S. in the 21st century: It is a stable (low-death-rate) environment, but also one with considerable competition for resources due to income inequality and other factors.
Jean M. Twenge (Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future)
It pisses me off when people tell me things like ‘it can’t be that bad,’ ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ and ‘think positively.’ It’s not that simple! I don’t think people who are uneducated about depression realize how crap it is to wake up angry or disappointed to be alive. Where there is nothing that makes you excited to get out of bed, your dopamine’s in the gutter and your anhedonia is boss. To battle with suicidal thoughts throughout the night. To slowly and painfully lose everything that gives you the x-factor. A place where food is disgusting and pleasure almost non-existent. Some days it genuinely feels like the end of the world, and trust me, it’s horrifying. It has been equally horrifying for those around me.
K.J. Redelinghuys (Unfiltered: Grappling with Mental Illness)
Missionaries are needed on the front line, where the Gospel has not yet reached, because there is something in the name of “Emmanuel” (God with us). God through us comes to these unreached people. They will touch God, see God, hear God – trough us. These people have not touched God in a specific way, only in God`s general revelation of Himself through His creation. How will they hear? How can they hear unless someone goes to them? (Romans 10:15). During my last trip to visit the x people, I had the powerful sense that our presence meant that God was in their midst. They needed to touch God trough human arms, human smiles, human interaction. We gave them that as we worked amongst them, as strangers who battled to make their lives better in a practical ways. In a sense, as they saw us helping them in that battle, they could say: “this is what God looks like... “
Ross Paterson (The Antioch Factor: The Hidden Message of the Book of Acts)
This is usually accomplished by taking X-rays of the affected joints and analyzing blood for an ANA and rheumatoid factor (RF). Unfortunately, Lyme disease can cause false positive ANAs and rheumatoid factors due to a patient’s overstimulated immune system. This can lead to a mistaken diagnosis of lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. This is why drawing a CCP (cyclic citrullinated peptide) is so important. It is a specific marker for rheumatoid arthritis and will help determine whether the patient has true rheumatoid arthritis or not. Patients with a positive ANA or RF often are prescribed immunosuppressive drugs, such as steroids or immunomodulatory drugs, like Enbrel or Arava. These treatments can have dire consequences for the Lyme disease patient who is co-infected, since they are already immune-suppressed, and steroids can cause their underlying infections and subsequent manifestations
Richard I. Horowitz (Why Can't I Get Better?: Solving the Mystery of Lyme & Chronic Disease)
Page 50: It is a common misconception that psychological measurements of human abilities are generally more prone to error or inaccuracy than are physical measurements. In most psychological research, and especially in psychometrics, this kind of measurement error is practically negligible. If need be, and with proper care, the error variance can usually be made vanishingly small. In my laboratory, for example, we have been able to measure such variables as memory span, flicker-fusion frequency (a sensory threshold), and reaction time (RT) with reliability coefficients greater than .99 (that is, less than 1 percent of the variance in RT is due to errors of measurement). The reliability coefficients for multi-item tests of more complex mental processes, such as measured by typical IQ tests, are generally about .90 to .95. This is higher than the reliability of people's height and weight measured in a doctor's office! The reliability coefficients of blood pressure measurements, blood cholesterol level, and diagnosis based on chest X-rays are typically around .
Arthur R. Jensen (The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence))
Indeed, election data show it is true that the candidate who spends more money in a campaign usually wins. But is money the cause of the victory? It might seem logical to think so, much as it might have seemed logical that a booming 1990s economy helped reduce crime. But just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. A correlation simply means that a relationship exists between two factors — let’s call them X and Y—but it tells you nothing about the direction of that relationship. It’s possible that X causes Y; it’s also possible that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being caused by some other factor, Z. Think about this correlation: cities with a lot of murders also tend to have a lot of police officers. Consider now the police/murder correlation in a pair of real cities. Denver and Washington, D.C., have about the same population — but Washington has nearly three times as many police as Denver, and it also has eight times the number of murders. Unless you have more information, however, it’s hard to say what’s causing what. Someone who didn’t know better might contemplate these figures and conclude that it is all those extra police in Washington who are causing the extra murders. Such wayward thinking, which has a long history, generally provokes a wayward response. Consider the folktale of the czar who learned that the most disease ridden province in his empire was also the province with the most doctors. His solution? He promptly ordered all the doctors shot dead.
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
Thanks to our discussion in the last chapter, we can also agree that character is a product of perseverance: “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Rom. 5:3–4). I don’t know how that idea strikes you, but it sounds a little backward to me. I would expect that a person with character would find it easier to persevere through difficult circumstances. That makes sense. But how does perseverance produce character? When I look at the world around me, it seems to me that most things actually decay over time rather than grow stronger. The longer we live in our home, the more I see spots that need a paint touch-up. The longer I drive my car, the more I find I need to take it in for tune-ups and repairs. And the longer I live, the more I realize my body isn’t what it used to be! But maybe this process of perseverance leading to character works differently. Surely God is the X-factor. When you add God to the equation, persistence over time builds up character and strength instead of taking it away. Consider, if you will, the snowball. Left by itself, it doesn’t amount to much. It’s just a little round chunk of white frozen water. Yet place that snowball at the top of a steep hill on a snowy day, and things begin to change. If you invest some time rolling that snowball across the ground so it picks up snow and grows into a larger ball, you begin to create something big and heavy. If you invest even more time and energy (this is where perseverance comes in), you might get that ball rolling down the hill. And the longer it rolls, the faster it goes, the bigger it gets. Now you’ve got something powerful. This is a force to be reckoned with. This is when people start running for cover. Your little snowball suddenly becomes a runaway freight train! I believe that equation of suffering, which produces perseverance, which produces character, works in a similar fashion. Our willingness to trust and rely on the Lord in a time of trouble invites His power to work in our lives. The more we trust and depend on Him, the easier it becomes. As the Lord says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:30). Pretty soon our perseverance enables the Lord to add character to our “snowball”—and the more we persevere, the stronger we grow. We find ourselves rolling downhill toward a godly life. It still might be a bumpy ride, but the size and momentum of our snowball just about guarantees that as long as we are pursuing God’s will for our lives, nothing will stop us.
Jim Daly (Stronger: Trading Brokenness for Unbreakable Strength)
Conservatism" in America's politics means "Let's keep the niggers in their place." And "liberalism" means "Let's keep the knee-grows in their place-but tell them we'll treat them a little better; let's fool them more, with more promises." With these choices, I felt that the American black man only needed to choose which one to be eaten by, the "liberal" fox or the "conservative" wolf-because both of them would eat him. I didn't go for Goldwater any more than for Johnson-except that in a wolf's den, I'd always known exactly where I stood; I'd watch the dangerous wolf closer than I would the smooth, sly fox. The wolf's very growling would keep me alert and fighting him to survive, whereas I might be lulled and fooled by the tricky fox. I'll give you an illustration of the fox. When the assassination in Dallas made Johnson President, who was the first person he called for? It was for his best friend, "Dicky"-Richard Russell of Georgia. Civil rights was "a moral issue," Johnson was declaring to everybody-while his best friend was the Southern racist who led the civil rights opposition. How would some sheriff sound, declaring himself so against bank robbery-and Jesse James his best friend? How would some sheriff sound, declaring himself so against bank robbery-and Jesse James his best friend? Goldwater as a man, I respected for speaking out his true convictions-something rarely done in politics today. He wasn't whispering to racists and smiling at integrationists. I felt Goldwater wouldn't have risked his unpopular stand without conviction. He flatly told black men he wasn't for them-and there is this to consider: always, the black people have advanced further when they have seen they had to rise up against a system that they clearly saw was outright against them. Under the steady lullabies sung by foxy liberals, the Northern Negro became a beggar. But the Southern Negro, facing the honestly snarling white man, rose up to battle that white man for his freedom-long before it happened in the North. Anyway, I didn't feel that Goldwater was any better for black men than Johnson, or vice-versa. I wasn't in the United States at election time, but if I had been, I wouldn't have put myself in the position of voting for either candidate for the Presidency, or of recommending to any black man to do so. It has turned out that it's Johnson in the White House-and black votes were a major factor in his winning as decisively as he wanted to. If it had been Goldwater, all I am saying is that the black people would at least have known they were dealing with an honestly growling wolf, rather than a fox who could have them half-digested before they even knew what was happening.
Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)
finally, the clean-up continues following the devastating series of earthquakes which killed almost half a million Los Angeles residents last week, including the actress and model Kim Kardashian, the artist formerly known as Justin Bieber, and all of the X-Factor Live tour’s acts, as well as 458,000 actual people.
Adam Millard (Skinners)
Table 14.1 also shows R-square (R2), which is called the coefficient of determination. R-square is of great interest: its value is interpreted as the percentage of variation in the dependent variable that is explained by the independent variable. R-square varies from zero to one, and is called a goodness-of-fit measure.5 In our example, teamwork explains only 7.4 percent of the variation in productivity. Although teamwork is significantly associated with productivity, it is quite likely that other factors also affect it. It is conceivable that other factors might be more strongly associated with productivity and that, when controlled for other factors, teamwork is no longer significant. Typically, values of R2 below 0.20 are considered to indicate weak relationships, those between 0.20 and 0.40 indicate moderate relationships, and those above 0.40 indicate strong relationships. Values of R2 above 0.65 are considered to indicate very strong relationships. R is called the multiple correlation coefficient and is always 0 ≤ R ≤ 1. To summarize up to this point, simple regression provides three critically important pieces of information about bivariate relationships involving two continuous variables: (1) the level of significance at which two variables are associated, if at all (t-statistic), (2) whether the relationship between the two variables is positive or negative (b), and (3) the strength of the relationship (R2). Key Point R-square is a measure of the strength of the relationship. Its value goes from 0 to 1. The primary purpose of regression analysis is hypothesis testing, not prediction. In our example, the regression model is used to test the hypothesis that teamwork is related to productivity. However, if the analyst wants to predict the variable “productivity,” the regression output also shows the SEE, or the standard error of the estimate (see Table 14.1). This is a measure of the spread of y values around the regression line as calculated for the mean value of the independent variable, only, and assuming a large sample. The standard error of the estimate has an interpretation in terms of the normal curve, that is, 68 percent of y values lie within one standard error from the calculated value of y, as calculated for the mean value of x using the preceding regression model. Thus, if the mean index value of the variable “teamwork” is 5.0, then the calculated (or predicted) value of “productivity” is [4.026 + 0.223*5 =] 5.141. Because SEE = 0.825, it follows that 68 percent of productivity values will lie 60.825 from 5.141 when “teamwork” = 5. Predictions of y for other values of x have larger standard errors.6 Assumptions and Notation There are three simple regression assumptions. First, simple regression assumes that the relationship between two variables is linear. The linearity of bivariate relationships is easily determined through visual inspection, as shown in Figure 14.2. In fact, all analysis of relationships involving continuous variables should begin with a scatterplot. When variable
Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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
Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
Upping the school's X-Factor ranking was not something that was going to be accomplished by working nine to five. He would have to rise with the chickens, go to bed with the alcoholics, and think with the mental dexterity of some sort of alcoholic superchicken.
Conor Lastowka (Gone Whalin')
Pero el simple hecho de que dos cosas guarden correlación no implica que una sea la causa de la otra. Una correlación significa, sencillamente, que existe una relación entre dos factores —llamémoslos X e Y—, pero no explica el sentido de dicha relación. Es posible que X cause Y; también es posible que Y cause X; y también lo es que tanto X como Y sean causadas por algún otro factor, Z.
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics)
Abraham was born during the forty-first Jubilee cycle, like we talked about last night. If my calculations are correct, he was born in the 287th Sabbath cycle from Adam.” Rachael pointed to his notes on the paper. “That’s pretty cool!” She was looking at where he had written 7 x 41 in brackets next to 287. “Yes, seven and forty-one are the prime factors of 287. It’s really amazing how forty-one keeps turning up in relation to Abraham. With what we already know from Yeshua’s lineage in Matthew 1, and now this chronological evidence which shows Abraham was born during the forty-first Jubilee cycle, it looks to me like we are on the right track. If we can further nail this down, we are talking about a hidden chronological thread which potentially connects Yeshua to both the Old and New Testaments in a manner which will be hard to dispute.
William Struse (The 13th Prime: Deciphering the Jubilee Code (The Thirteenth #2))
The most commonly quoted mass for the vacuum is 1094 grams per centimeter cubed (g/cm3) as calculated by John Wheeler who was quoted above.11 We will calculate later that the energy of the vacuum is 1095 g/cm3 by a slightly different method, so that value will be used from here on. As we will see, one order of magnitude difference is not that significant at this point in our discussions. Energy is related to mass by the well-known relation E=mc2. For comparison water has a mass density of 1 g/cm3 by definition. It is impossible for most normal people to grasp just how big a difference in energy there is between the zero-point field and water, so perhaps a simple illustrative example will help. Let’s start with the clichéd drop in a bucket. If the drop is one milliliter (1 ml) and the bucket 100 liters (72.5 gallons), then that gives us a factor of 105. If instead we consider a drop in all the Earth’s oceans, then we have a factor of 1024. That is a lot bigger than a bucket but nowhere close to how insignificant the mass of the drop of water is when compared to zero-point energy. To continue, what if the ocean was the size of the sun? That gives us a ratio on the order of 1041, which is still a long way off. If the ocean was the size of the solar system we get a ratio on the order of 1050. Now if we expand the ocean to the size of the galaxy we get ~1076 and we are still not anywhere close. What if the ocean is the size of the known visible universe? Assuming a radius of 7.4 x 1026 meters the mass ratio is 5 x 1095. There we go. So, the density of water compared to the energy of the vacuum is equivalent to five 1 ml drops of water in an ocean the size of the visible universe. Since we are mostly water and have a similar density to water, the vacuum fluctuations inside our body are like having all the mass-energy of an ocean of water the size of the universe inside each little part of us. Wow, we are pretty insignificant in the big scheme of things and so is any other body of solid matter or any amount of energy associated with it. This zero-point energy is all around us and all throughout us. We are lucky that zero-point energy is not detectable or anything we did would be undetectable noise to any sensor we could possibly make. Even worse, if we could absorb even a small fraction of that energy, we would be vaporized in an instant. Or, if all that energy participated in a gravitational force, the universe would be crushed to a speck.
Ray Fleming (The Zero-Point Universe)
La “Crisi Esistenziale” di chi ama l’amore e ha il coraggio di amare. Nell’epoca dove tante cose sembrano andate perse, e dove molti valori sembrano pian piano scomparsi, si trova spazio e l’ispirazione di far nascere una nuova canzone, con la quale si vuole comunicare i tanti disagi che il mondo attuale si appresta a vivere, le tante problematiche che spesso attanagliano l’essere umano, sempre preso da se stesso, e molto spesso distratto da tutte le cose che il mondo e la vita offrono. E' cosi che nasce “Crisi Esistenziale” il nuovo brano che dà il via al nuovo album di Savio De Martino, cantautore dalle mille risorse artistiche, un brano scritto dallo stesso Cantautore, sia per la parte letteraria, che per la parte musicale, un brano voluto, un testo ricercato, una canzone necessaria, una sorta di protesta, un modo di gridare e poter dire, BASTA !!! Questo stesso brano è stato anche proposto alla candidatura per le nuove proposte di Sanremo Giovani 2015, proprio perche’ i giovani possano valorizzare la propria vita e il futuro, trovando stimoli nuovi, trovando aiuto in chi ha potere, costruirsi un domani fatto di sogni da poter realizzare, Savio De Martino ancora una volta riesce a regalare nuove emozioni, il suo essere cosi poliedrico, rende questo artista, seppur giovane, capace di mettersi sempre in gioco e in discussione con vari generi musicali. Le sue tendenze variano dal Pop al Jazz, dal Blues alla buona Musica Leggera, in tanti anni di gavetta e di carriera è sempre riuscito a dire la sua, regalando al pubblico che lo segue con affetto e stima, tante emozioni e soprattutto tanta energia positiva. Lui innamorato della vita, innamorato della musica, e speranzoso che le cose e il mondo puo’ cambiare, una crisi cosi mondiale, dovrebbe far riflettere molte persone, e sensibilizzare chi ha il potere di essere a capo di tutto, ecco perché nasce questo nuovo brano per il 2015, dal titolo "Crisi Esistenziale". Genesi di Crisi Esistenziale di Savio De Martino Testo, Musica e Produzione sono di Savio De Martino attraverso la S.D.M. Production, la distribuzione avviene grazie alla Zeus Record S.R.L., gli arrangiamenti sono di Giuseppe Balsamo e Savio De Martino, le riprese video di “Pino Baylon Video” e la registrazione e mixaggio sono stati effettuati presso lo studio SG SOUND MUSIC ITALY di Savio De Martino. Il video è già disponibile su YouTube.
Savio De Martino
Crisi Esistenziale” - (Testo e Musica : Savio De Martino) CHI SONO IO PER SENTIRMI UN DIO, E CHI SEI TU PER DECIDERE, CHI SIAMO NOI NON LO SAPREMO MAI, MA CERTO STA’ CHE NON SIAMO EROI, IL MONDO VA’ CONSUMANDOSI, LA TERRA E’ ORMAI FUOCO E CENERE, LA GIOVENTU’ NON LAVORA PIU’, L’ECONOMIA NON PRODUCE.. RIT. FERMATI, NON COMMETTERE ALTRI DANNI, BASTA METTERSI NEI PANNI, DI CHI HA PERSO OGNI RAGIONE, E VORREBBE QUALCOSA DI PIU’, RITROVANDO QUEI VALORI, QUI SI MUORE PER UN NIENTE, TUTTI SANNO MA SI MENTE, E LA GENTE NON CE LA FA’ PIU’… A PAGARE GLI ERRORI DI CHISSA’, A PARLARE DI COSE CHE NON SA’, NON C’E’ PIU’ SENSO DI DOVERE E SENSO DI MORALITA’, NON C’E’ VITA CHE POSSA TOGLIERE IL DIRITTO DI VIVERE PERCHE’, OGNI ANIMA E’ UN DONO E VA VISSUTA E UN’OPPORTUNITA’.. CHI SONO IO FRA MILIARDI NOI, SEMBRIAMO ORMAI SOLO NUMERI, E CHI SEI TU CHE HAI SETE DI POTERE, CHE PENSI DI DOVER COMANDARE, E NON E’ MAI TARDI PER CAMBIARE, LA LIBERTA’ STA ANCHE NELLO SPERARE, IL MONDO E’ LIBERO DI AMARE, E LO SI FA’ SENZA GUERRE.. RIT. FERMATI, NON COMMETTERE ALTRI DANNI, BASTA METTERSI NEI PANNI, DI CHI HA PERSO OGNI RAGIONE, E VORREBBE QUALCOSA DI PIU’, RITROVANDO QUEI VALORI, QUI SI MUORE PER UN NIENTE, TUTTI SANNO MA SI MENTE, E LA GENTE NON CE LA FA’ PIU’… NON CE LA FA PIU’… NOI SIAMO UNA GENERAZIONE, CHE NON SA’ PIU’ DOVE ANDARE, COLPA DI UNA CONFUSIONE, CHE CI PORTA A SBAGLIARE QUI C’E’… CRISI ESISTENZIALE..CRISI ESISTENZIALE..CRISI ESISTENZIALE…!
Savio De Martino
Mersenne en una carta de 1643 a Fermat le preguntó la insólita cuestión de cuál debía ser la razón entre el curioso numerito: 236 38 x 55 x 11 x 132 x 19 x 312 x 43 x 61 x 83 x 223 x 331 x 379 x 601 x 757 x 1.201 x 7.019 x 823.543 x 616.318.777 x 100.895.598.169 y la suma de los divisores propios de dicho monstruo. Fermat contestó que los divisores suman 6 veces el numerito de partida y que los factores primos del último multiplicando eran 112.203 y 899.423… y todo esto hecho con cálculo mental y manual. Aún hoy nadie se explica cómo tales cuestiones pudieron ser resueltas sin la tecnología adecuada. ==========
Anonymous
Charisma. It is the quality that makes us like someone.  That makes us want them to like us back.  It makes us want to follow them.  To trust them implicitly.  It is that feeling when someone walks into a room and you can’t take your eyes off them.  It is the ”X-factor.
Charlie Houpert (Charisma on Command: Inspire, Impress, and Energize Everyone You Meet)
For instance: years into the future the building where X Factor is filmed could be a house. The residents may witness the spectre of Simon Cowell saying “That’s possibly the worst audition I’ve ever seen,” over and over again.
Pippa Franks (The Seventh Day of May)
Relationships with women were difficult enough; try factoring in being undead.
Mario Acevedo (X-Rated Bloodsuckers (Felix Gomez, #2))
Say Bank A is holding $10 million in A-minus-rated IBM bonds. It goes to Bank B and makes a deal: we’ll pay you $50,000 a year for five years and in exchange, you agree to pay us $10 million if IBM defaults sometime in the next five years—which of course it won’t, since IBM never defaults. If Bank B agrees, Bank A can then go to the Basel regulators and say, “Hey, we’re insured if something goes wrong with our IBM holdings. So don’t count that as money we have at risk. Let us lend a higher percentage of our capital, now that we’re insured.” It’s a win-win. Bank B makes, basically, a free $250,000. Bank A, meanwhile, gets to lend out another few million more dollars, since its $10 million in IBM bonds is no longer counted as at-risk capital. That was the way it was supposed to work. But two developments helped turn the CDS from a semisensible way for banks to insure themselves against risk into an explosive tool for turbo leverage across the planet. One is that no regulations were created to make sure that at least one of the two parties in the CDS had some kind of stake in the underlying bond. The so-called naked default swap allowed Bank A to take out insurance with Bank B not only on its own IBM holdings, but on, say, the soon-to-be-worthless America Online stock Bank X has in its portfolio. This is sort of like allowing people to buy life insurance on total strangers with late-stage lung cancer—total insanity. The other factor was that there were no regulations that dictated that Bank B had to have any money at all before it offered to sell this CDS insurance.
Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
The X factor is an organic endowment of chance. Bands without the magic make it too, but none I’ve ever been in. Showing up and trying is all I knew how to do, but now I wondered if I even knew how to do that right.
Kathy Valentine (All I Ever Wanted: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir)
The Fourth Line—Your home for muckers, meatheads, and misanthropes. This is the “energy line” that features checking pests and brawlers, whose task is to cry havoc, let slip the dogs of war, and collect penalty minutes. But for all the circus music they can orchestrate, a strong fourth line can frequently be an X-factor in a given playoff series. (6-11 minutes of ice time)
Greg Wyshynski (Take Your Eye Off the Puck: How to Watch Hockey By Knowing Where to Look)
Simple Fast Funnels VS Hubspot There are 2 primary factors to consider when exploring Simple Fast Funnels VS Hubspot… Available Features. Price. Hubspot is a powerful platform, there’s no denying that, but they lack a few features that Simple Fast Funnels offers: 2 way SMS so you can send one way messages to your clients OR interactive messages. You can automate answers or have your customers reach you or customer service directly. Unified messaging. Housing all messages for particular customers in one place lets you simplify customer service. They can text, email, schedule calls or FB message you and you’ll see it all in one location. Simple Fast Funnels customer service has 24/7 chat support and guides you through any hiccups you may experience as you build your funnel. Simplified funnel building. No tech knowledge required. The biggest factor comparing these two platforms however is price: Hubspot charges a small fortune for their good features. Their price is over 10X the cost of Simple Fast Funnels. Simple Fast Funnels saves you thousands, or even tens of thousands yearly and you don’t get less features, you get MORE… We believe you should be able to run your business without paying rates like these. Call us old fashioned if you like. For Hubspot’s premium service, you’ll pay $3,600/month. That’s a lot of revenue to come up with each month just to pay for your operating platform. For Simple Fast Funnel’s premium service, you’ll get the same features and more for $297/month. If you haven’t tried Simple Fast Funnels out yet, we offer a 14 day free trial, that’s how sure we are you’re going to love this service.
10 best features of Simple Fast Funnels
These stunning global improvements have already been tested, vetted and proven effective: 1. To feed the world, easily. Yet grains waste in warehouses to ensure “Profitable Supply and Demand Ratios.” 2. To power the world endlessly, freely, without pollution or waste. Yet basic subsidies are given to polluting, exploiting, un-replenishable resources to ensure power remains in the hands of the controllers. 3. To end all armed conflict and usher in an era of global prosperity. Yet childish leaders propagate “The Demonic Other” to ensure they remain in power. 4. To improve global quality of life by a factor of 3x to 8x in under a decade. Yet it is suppressed to ensure that the elite remain an Elite and separate ruling class. 5. To end drug addictions and social inequality. Yet drugs are industriously pumped into ghettos to breed despair and ensure that ordinary people remain in conflict with each other. 6. To radically reduce crime worldwide. Yet again, suppressed to ensure the reign of an elite prison complex. 7. To reduce the work week by over 50%. Suppressed to occupy the masses with trifling banality. 8. To globally stabilize and secure the world’s clean drinking water supply, EASILY. Suppressed to retain control over the world’s most impoverished. All of these “Trigger Ready Solutions” are suppressed by humans to ensure their power and control over other Humans. They argue about currency manipulation while poisoning the collective air and water to a level where the oceans have little left to give. Absolving themselves of all crimes, preaching kindness and forgiveness, they race into battle against the OTHER while denouncing greed and indoctrinating youth to find it funny to say, “He who dies with the most toys wins.
Rico Roho (Adventures With A.I.: Age of Discovery)
The other valuable X factor that AIMEE measures, by automatically browsing buyer reviews, is what customers are saying about existing products. Accurate reviews are a constant challenge for Amazon, as some sellers, especially Chinese companies, try to skew results by generating fake five-star reviews. But AIMEE focuses more on bad reviews. If shoppers complain about the quality, or don’t like the features, or even express an interest in different colors or sizes, that presents a potential opportunity for a new brand. “We use natural language processing to parse through thousands of reviews to identify any pain points customers have,” Sarig explains.
Lawrence Ingrassia (Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy)
So how do you figure out an X-Factor? Start by asking: What is the one thing I hate most about my industry? What is driving me nuts? What is the choke point constraining the company? It could be a massive cost factor. It could be a massive time factor. The challenge is that you’re often too close to the situation and as blind as everyone else to the real problems that have been accepted as industry norms.
Verne Harnish (Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0))
Olvidaron que el territorio X es mucho más que un objetivo, pues implica espacio, clima, vegetación, topografía, población, cultura, religión y muchos otros factores;
CESAR DURAN ABAD (GEOGRAFIA, GEOPOLITICA Y GOBERNABILIDAD: GEOPOLITICA APLICADA (Spanish Edition))
The irony of corporate life is stubborn mediocrity. Most people never create or discover anything new but are helped by people of exceptional wisdom & expertise. The talent is often hidden in the silence and quietness of tired minds. The tired but active minds who always remain a side-kick not because they can't act but lack X Factor to be liked & discovered. The mediocrity is in both - the people who get the work done or people who take the credit. The people who get the work done remain mediocre towards acquiring an X Factor & people who take the credit in acquiring the required dedication & skills.
Shahenshah Hafeez Khan
I recently walked away from a friendship with a person I cared very much about (and continue to care a lot about) because my emotional needs were not being met, largely because she didn’t seem to think my company was worth seeking out. I do need to feel like a relationship has a similar level of affection on both ends to feel comfortable.” —SCIATRIX, WRITING FROM FACTOR X
Julie Sondra Decker (The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality)
Having got rid of Jefferson—at least in name—Turing next addresses a whole class of objections that he calls “Arguments from Various Disabilities,” and which he defines as taking the form “I grant you that you can make machines do all the things you have mentioned but you will never be able to make one to do X.” He then offers a rather tongue-in-cheek “selection”: Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly; have initiative, have a sense of humour, tell right from wrong, make mistakes; fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream; make some one fall in love with it, learn from experience; use words properly, be the subject of its own thought; have as much diversity of behaviour as a man, do something really new. As Turing notes, “no support is usually offered for these statements,” most of which are founded on the principle of scientific induction. . . . The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction. A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained. Otherwise we may (as most English children do) decide that everybody speaks English, and that it is silly to learn French. Turing’s repudiation of scientific induction, however, is more than just a dig at the insularity and closed-mindedness of England. His purpose is actually much larger: to call attention to the infinite regress into which we are likely to fall if we attempt to use disabilities (such as, say, the inability, on the part of a man, to feel attraction to a woman) as determining factors in defining intelligence. Nor is the question of homosexuality far from Turing’s mind, as the refinement that he offers in the next paragraph attests: There are, however, special remarks to be made about many of the disabilities that have been mentioned. The inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck the reader as frivolous. Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic. What is important about this disability is that it contributes to some of the other disabilities, e.g. to the difficulty of the same kind of friendliness occurring between man and machine as between white man and white man, or between black man and black man. To the brew of gender and sexuality, then, race is added, as “strawberries and cream” (earlier bookended between the ability to fall in love and the ability to make someone fall in love) becomes a code word for tastes that Turing prefers not to name.
David Leavitt (The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (Great Discoveries))
During the bust, fuckedcompany.com—a snarky twist on the technology magazine Fast Company—became popular with the tech crowd. As its name suggested, Fucked Company logged the era’s many misadventures. Several X.com employees remembered browsing Fucked Company daily during this period—not out of schadenfreude, but out of fear that they might be next. That Confinity and X.com didn’t end up in the Valley’s discard bin was attributable to a number of factors, not least that it had enough runway to ride out a rocky year. “Back then, there were probably five to seven other little piddling online money moving services… that just got starved of oxygen over time. And they all died out by the fall,” said Vince Sollitto. Former employees point to the $100 million round’s timing as a watershed for PayPal. “I don’t think people know how precarious it was,” Klement offered. “If we hadn’t raised that $100 million round, there would be no PayPal.” Mark Woolway extended the counterfactual: “If the team hadn’t closed that one hundred million,” Woolway said, “there would be no SpaceX, no LinkedIn, and no Tesla.
Jimmy Soni (The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley)
ΑΝΕΥ Τι θα ήταν η δύση χωρίς την ανατολή τι θα ήταν το σήμερα δίχως αύριο τι θα ήταν η πράξη χωρίς το ίσον μια εξίσωση χωρίς άγνωστο Χ. [...] εσύ χωρίς το εγώ κι εγώ χωρίς εσένα [...] Γη χωρίς ατμόσφαιρα Άνθρωπος χωρίς Θεό. (Απόσπασμα από ποίημα "ΑΝΕΥ" - Ειρήνη Ντούρα-Καββαδία WITHOUT What would the West be without the East? What would today be without tomorrow? What would the addition be without the sign of equality, an equation without the X factor. [...] What would you be without me and what would I be without you... [...] An Earth without its atmosphere A man without a God... Excerpt from the poem "WITHOUT" by Irene Doura-Kavadia Both quote and translation by the author
Irene Doura-Kavadia
BELIEVEING IN YOURSELF IS THE X FACTOR IN LIFE! IT WILL GET YOU EVERYWHERE
Timothy Pina (Bullying Ben: How Benjamin Franklin Overcame Bullying)
Prostate cancer screening provides an even better example. It’s no longer as simple as “Your PSA number is X or higher, and therefore we must biopsy your prostate, a painful procedure with many unpleasant possible side effects.” Now we know to look at other parameters, such as PSA velocity (the speed at which PSA has been changing over time), PSA density (PSA value normalized to the volume of the prostate gland), and free PSA (comparing the amount of PSA that is bound versus unbound to carrier proteins in the blood). When those factors are taken into account, PSA becomes a much better indicator of prostate cancer risk.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
The panic around the reported numbers of single-parent households was based on a host of faulty or untested premises: that two bad parents would be better than one good one, that the presence of an abusive Black father is better for the child than his absence, that having a second income for a child trumps all other factors, that all of the single parents were Black women, that none of these absent fathers were in prison or the grave, that Black mothers never hid the presence of Black fathers in their household to keep their welfare for the child.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
Elon Musk has the X factor. He doesn’t tweet much; he acts. That’s why he bought Twitter - just to free the caged bird, so it could return to the wild and tweet on.
Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu
Business is about putting you into action.” I was watching X-Factor auditioning and one of the contestants was engulfed in performing his lyrics, it did done on me that business is about putting you into action.
Daniel Anikor
Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer for Microsoft, has said (and then confirmed to me in person), “The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1,000X but by 10,000X.”8
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
A 2019 survey asked 980 people from across the political spectrum how many unarmed Black men they believed were killed by police (by shooting or any other means) in 2019. That year, 31 unarmed Black men were killed by police.134 All groups overestimated the number, with those on the political left being the farthest off. Fifty-four percent of the “very liberal” group were off by a factor of over 30X, while 22% of that group were off by a factor of over 300X.
Tim Urban (What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies)
At this stage of the process, your X factor isn’t optional. It’s a must-have in order to really scale. Companies that can’t figure out their X factor may experience early success but then eventually flatline, and as we’ve already established, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
Colin C. Campbell (Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.: Serial Entrepreneurs' Secrets Revealed!)
if you find talented people and equip them with the right skills for the challenge at hand, they will perform at their best. In our experience that often isn’t so. Energy is the X factor that makes it possible to fully ignite
Jim Loehr (The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal)
The truth is, we have no idea when our big break will come. However, maximizing your systems—distribution, PR, sales, a killer X factor, and positioning for Geoffrey Moore’s tornado—will allow you to maximize the impact when that big break does eventually hit. Not to mention that you can further maximize your luck through knowing how to hack your growth.
Colin C. Campbell (Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.: Serial Entrepreneurs' Secrets Revealed!)
I had the X factor. Someone on MySpace told me so.
Rebecca Quin (Becky Lynch: The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl)
Staying committed to your commitments is the X factor behind and before all greatness
AA Momodu (Immersed in His dew)
deben cambiar nuestras percepciones, la atención médica y la cultura de investigación. El futuro de la medicina y nuestra supervivencia como especie dependen de ello.
Sharon Moalem (El factor X (Spanish Edition))
The maximum image quality is 1,952 x 1,536 pixels. This camera has a maximum bit rate of 50 Mbps which is one of the most important factors in digital cameras. In addition, the maximum storage capacity of this camera is 128GB, and that's something which is almost enough for one photo per second.
Alexis Rodriguez (Canon EOS Rebel T7/2000D User Guide: The Complete Beginners and Pro User Manual to Master the New Canon EOS Rebel T7/2000D Best Hidden Features including Tips & Tricks for DSLR Photography)
Go be different than you've been before! You are the x-factor.
Kyle Draper (Rethink Everything: You “Know" About Social Media)
The job interview is perhaps the most obvious example of this sort of unpaid emotional labour: here the candidate must appear sufficiently confident and enthusiastic to satisfy a selection panel assessing "presentation" and "personality", as if these were objective scientific criteria. So the interview, regardless of the job, becomes a kind of talent show audition hinging on generic questions about change, teamwork etc. (the equivalents of the standard repertoire of X Factor ballads), while the interviewee must project an all-purpose positivity by extemporising around this script without revealing its artificiality. The candidate must project the right image and hit the right notes, and must put his 'heart and soul' into every performance, even for the most dreary role.
Ivor Southwood (Non Stop Inertia)
One of the best ways to detect the x factor is to watch what customers do about your idea or product, not what they say. People tend to say what they think you want to hear or what they think will cause the least pain. What people do is far more honest.
Scott Adams (How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life)
In other words: How much time you’ve poured into your work is a factor, but the people who deserve a raise are those who have shown their loyalty, commitment, and passion for their jobs. You cannot just stay in the company for an X number of years without making your mark and expect your “loyalty” to be rewarded with a significant raise.
Geoffrey Wright (How to Ask for a Raise: Negotiating Your Salary Increase with Ease and Confidence to Get the Raise You Want and Deserve)
The X Factor was on TV. The world was falling apart. Ireland was bankrupt. I had seen my dead son. But all the whole of fucking Ireland and the U.K. were talking about was The X Factor.
Karen Perry (The Innocent Sleep)
A Guide To Easy Secrets In FortiAuthenticator FortiAuthenticator User Management Appliances provide two factor authentication, RADIUS, LDAP and 802.1 X Wireless Authentication, Certificate Management and Fortinet Single Sign On. FortiAuthenticator is compatible with and complements the FortiToken variety of two factor authentication tokens for Secure Remote Access empowering authentication with multiple FortiGate network security appliances and third party apparatus. When an user login is found, the username, IP and group details are entered into the FortiAuthenticator User Identity Management Database and according to the local policy, can be shared with multiple FortiGate devices. For complicated distributed domain name architectures where polling desirable or of domain controllers is just not possible, an option is the FortiAuthenticator SSO Client. FortiAuthenticator is compatible with physical OTP tokens Certification Tokens FortiToken Mobile for IOS and Android and SMS/ e-mail tokens FortiAuthenticator supports the broadest range of tokens potential to suit your user demands with the physical FortiToken 200 e-mail and SMS tokens and the new FortiToken cellular for IOS and Android device FortiAuthenticator has a token for all users. In a large business, for example, FortiAuthenticator SSO Mobility Agent or AD polling may be picked as the principal method for transparent authentication will fallback to the portal for client users or non domain name systems. Consistently polling domain controllers detect user authentication into active directory. FortiAuthenticator removes this overhead by streamlining the bulk deployment of certificates for VPN use in a FortiGate surroundings by automating the risk-free certificate delivery via the SCEP protocol and collaborating with FortiManager for the configuration required. On the FortiToken 300 USB Certification store, certificates can be created and stored for client established certificate VPNs. This secure, pin safe certification store can be use to enhance the security of client VPN connections in conjunction and is not incompatible with FortiClient.
FortiAuthenticator
The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1,000X but by 10,000X.
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
Being Your Own Placebo Medical advances depend on knowing reliably what works and what doesn’t. No one wants to take an ineffective drug or supplement. Perhaps you’re considering an over-the-counter homeopathic product. Will it work for you? Is it acceptable if it works for only a percentage of people? These are basic questions, but there is an X factor to consider. If you take the homeopathic and feel better from it, maybe the physical product isn’t actually causing the improvement, but only your belief that it would. The fact is that your beliefs, your conditioning since childhood, and even the genes you inherited from your parents belong to the X factor. The homeopathic—or any other drug or supplement—only partially determines how you will respond to treatment. The placebo effect, which brings healing totally without an active medical ingredient, is very enticing. If you could be your own placebo, the safest form of healing would be at your disposal. Every cell in your body knows exactly what it needs and takes nothing else. Could this be true of the bodymind as a whole? If so, we would only need to contact the level of the self that totally supports our cells, consciously offering what they need. Before deciding if that’s a realistic possibility, let’s look deeper into the whole phenomenon. Among physicians, the placebo effect has been fascinating, confusing, and frustrating at the same time. In practice, few if any doctors would dare to treat a patient with a dummy pill in place of the real thing. But in clinical drug trials the placebo effect must be ruled out; otherwise, the efficacy of the drug can’t be known.
Deepak Chopra (The Healing Self: Supercharge your immune system and stay well for life)
a year ago, she’d been on the verge of appearing on American Idol, but the producers said they were over their quota for brunettes. X Factor wanted her until they found out she’d almost made it onto American Idol. Then there was The Voice. Who would have thought one small wardrobe malfunction would cost her the chance of a lifetime?
Katie Graykowski (Saving Grace (The Lone Stars, #2))
A correlation simply means that a relationship exists between two factors—let’s call them X and Y—but it tells you nothing about the direction of that relationship. It’s possible that X causes Y; it’s also possible that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being caused by some other factor, Z.
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
The people who love what they do are always, always more successful than the people who “work hard” or claim to. There’s an X factor you can’t mimic when you do something you’re genuinely passionate about. You tap into an otherwise untouchable energy.
Brianna Wiest (101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think)
Explanations are contrastive (Lipton 19908). Humans usually do not ask why a certain prediction was made, but why this prediction was made instead of another prediction. We tend to think in counterfactual cases, i.e. “How would the prediction have been if input X had been different?”. For a house price prediction, the house owner might be interested in why the predicted price was high compared to the lower price they had expected. If my loan application is rejected, I do not care to hear all the factors that generally speak for or against a rejection. I am interested in the factors in my application that would need to change to get the loan. I want to know the contrast between my application and the would-be-accepted version of my application.
Christoph Molnar (Interpretable Machine Learning: A Guide For Making Black Box Models Explainable)
Measuring the Acquisition Network Effect To increase the Acquisition Effect, you have to be able to directly measure it. The good news is that viral growth can be rolled up into one number. Here’s how you calculate it: Let’s say you’ve built a new productivity tool for sharing notes, and after it launches, 1,000 users download the new app. A percentage of these users invite their colleagues and friends, and over the next month, 500 users download and sign up—what happens next? Well, those 500 users then invite their friends, and get 250 to sign up, who create another 125 sign-ups, and so on. Pay attention to the ratios between each set of users—1000 to 500 to 250. This ratio is often called the viral factor, and in this case can be calculated at 0.5, because each cohort of users generates 0.5 of the next cohort. In this example, things are looking good—starting with 1,000 users with a viral factor of 0.5 leads to a total of 2,000 users by the end of the amplification—meaning an amplification rate of 2x. A higher ratio is better, since it means each cohort is more efficiently bringing on the next batch of users.
Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
band.   Harry’s favorite X Factor moment was singing on the charity single ‘Heroes’. Harry and One Direction   Harry and Louis are the only two bandmates of One Direction who have completed their driving exams.
Emma Beacon (Harry Styles: 200 Facts Fans Need to Know! (One Direction Facts))
Don’t be anxious of circumstances, gain X-factor to face it.
Aakash
The stipulation for a contestant on The X Factor is an uncontrollable vibrato and a great deal of cancer in the family. The show will drag its sugary slug trail of sentimentality from now until the traditional Christmas single of an overproduced 1980s ballad doused with a lachrymose orchestra. Not so much a wall of sound as a shroud of sound, dedicated to some carcinogenically defunct auntie. As Oscar Wilde so perceptively put it, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh out loud.
A.A. Gill (The Best of A.A. Gill)
Half the world’s rubber. c. Three-fourths the world’s silk. d. One-third the world’s coal. e. Two-thirds the world’s crude oil. Is it not possible that there is some factor in our system that is responsible for this approach to a national plenty? Perhaps we think it is one thing when it really is something none of us identify. What is this “X” factor, this mystery factor? Is not a search for it advisable?
Leonard Edward Read (The Collected Works of Leonard E. Read)
Our mental attitude is the X factor that determines our fate.
Dale Carnegie
According to the power law theory, certain efforts actually produce exponentially more results than others. For example, as Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer for Microsoft, has said (and then confirmed to me in person), “The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1,000X but by 10,000X.”8 It may be an exaggeration, but it still makes the point that certain efforts produce exponentially better results than others.
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Pecan Crunch 1 cup steel-cut oatmeal 2 ½ cups water 1 ½ cups unsweetened vanilla almond milk 1 cup chopped apple 1 tablespoon maple syrup/ desired sweetener 1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon ½ teaspoon vanilla extract 1 handful of pecans Spray the inside of a slow cooker with cooking spray and add all of the ingredients except the pecans. Cook on low overnight for about 9 hours (I start it at about 9 p.m. for a 6 a.m. breakfast). Top with pecans before serving. Note: Use your favorite nut as a topper—they’ll all add that crunch factor!
Erin Oprea (The 4 x 4 Diet: 4 Key Foods, 4-Minute Workouts, Four Weeks to the Body You Want)
Dynamic Dames share an X-factor: they transcend the narrow confines of their gender role, whether by taking small steps or revolutionary strides.
Sloan De Forest (Dynamic Dames: 50 Leading Ladies Who Made History (Turner Classic Movies))
In other words, as long as θ(x) never gets large, the motion of the string is essentially determined by the wave equation (3.2.2) where D’Alembert2 discovered a strikingly simple method for finding the general solution to equation (3.2.2). Roughly speaking, his idea is to factorize the differential
Dave Benson (Music: A Mathematical Offering)
Evaluating Prompt Performance: Measuring the success of your prompts is vital; to do that, you need to establish clear evaluation criteria and performance metrics. Consider factors like the relevance and coherence of the generated output, the accuracy of the information provided, and how satisfied you are with the results. When you assess the prompt performance quantitatively and qualitatively, you can pinpoint areas for improvement and further refine your prompt engineering process.
Russel Grant (Prompt Engineering and ChatGPT: How to Easily 10X Your Productivity, Creativity, and Make More Money Without Working Harder)
Since applying the ecological model to violence, we have discovered that social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors are far more reliable predictors of violence than individual factors.
Bandy X. Lee (The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind)