Usable Quotes

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.

The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.

In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy. In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers... Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed? The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.

Where the world comes in my way—and it comes in my way everywhere—I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but—my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.

Schools train you to be ignorant with style [...] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright [...] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up.

Life is a journey, and you can't carry everything with you. Only the usable baggage.

Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.

If there's one thing you learn by working on a lot of different Web sites, it's that almost any design idea--no matter how appallingly bad--can be made usable in the right circumstances, with enough effort.

The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart.

There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men--many men--unfortunately aren't anything.

It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.

Can you play the piano like Beethoven? Or sing like Carly Simon? Can you take fie pages' worth of quotes and turn them into a usable story ten minutes before deadline? I don't think so, unless you have more hidden talents I don't know about. We all have our special sills. They don't make us better or worse than each other. Just different

It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.

As time passes, the system becomes less and less well-ordered. Sooner or later the fixing cease to gain any ground. Each forward step is matched by a backward one. Although in principle usable forever, the system has worn out as a base for progress. ...A brand-new, from-the-ground-up redesign is necessary.

Don't make me think

Intuitive design is how we give the user new superpowers.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.

Your primary role should be to share what you know, not to tell people how things should be done.

We must note the curious fact that people are not content with what is simple to understand, but go straight for the more complex problems which they will perhaps never grasp. What is simple to grasp is quite usable and useful, and can keep us occupied for a whole lifetime if it satisfies and stimulates us.

Designers love subtle cues, because subtlety is one of the traits of sophisticated design. But Web users are generally in such a hurry that they routinely miss subtle cues.

High-quality web content that's useful, usable, and enjoyable is one of the greatest competitive advantages you can create for yourself online.

The Bible attitude is not that God sends sickness or that sickness is of the devil, but that sickness is a fact usable by both God and the devil.

Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a bare minimum.

Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right.

Time goes forward because energy itself is always moving from an available to an unavailable state. Our consciousness is continually recording the entropy change in the world around us. We watch our friends get old and die. We sit next to a fire and watch it's red-hot embers turn slowly into cold white ashes. We experience the world always changing around us, and that experience is the unfolding of the second law. It is the irreversible process of dissipation of energy in the world. What does it mean to say, 'The world is running out of time'? Simply this: we experience the passage of time by the succession of one event after another. And every time an event occurs anywhere in this world energy is expended and the overall entropy is increased. To say the world is running out of time then, to say the world is running out of usable energy. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, 'Entropy is time's arrow'.

If you want a great site, you’ve got to test. After you’ve worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can’t see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.

usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology.

It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about "Give me your hungry...your oppressed...give me pretty much everybody"-that's the way I remember it, anyway. The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are-and should be-a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones.... We need more Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women.

The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Happy talk must die

In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.

Honesty is occasionally the best policy," she said yawning. And then she added, "By the Black Staff of Beldar, I am tired. If I can find a usable bed in what's left of my house I intend to collapse on it. And Elwyn, if you disturb me before dawn, I promise, I will turn you into a train of thought, and lose you.

SURVIVOR: To remain alive; to carry on despite hardships or trauma; persevere, to remain functional or usable, to live longer than; outlive, to persist or remain usable through, and to cope with a trauma or setback, to persevere after.

It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. —KRUG’S SECOND LAW OF USABILITY

Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable.

Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage--oop!--yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel. It's fossil fuel. And what do we do with fossil fuel? Why, we dump it into a bunker and burn it, of course. No, we don't do that. But you get my meaning. It's endlessly renewable, usable without diminishing one's capacity to create more.

Thirty spokes share one hub in non-being lies the use of the cart knead clay to make vessels in non-being lies the use of the vessel cut out doors and windows to make a house therefore form being comes what is usable and from non-being comes what is essential.

Keep it simple, so you'll keep doing it.

As a rule, conventions only become conventions if they work.

The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them—at least not until after repeated attempts at “muddling through” have failed.

Nothing important should ever be more than two clicks away

If you can’t make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.

Remember, the web isn't about control. If a visitor to your site is familiar with using a browser's native form doodad, you won't be doing them any favors if you override the browser functionality with your own widget, even if you think your widget looks better.

And not just the right thing; it’s profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people’s lives. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?

The problem is there are no simple “right” answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.

If something requires a large investment of time—or looks like it will—it’s less likely to be used.

When fixing problems, always do the least you can.

The fact that the people who built the site didn’t care enough to make things obvious—and easy—can erode our confidence in the site and the organization behind it.

I have nearly completed your disappearance

As long as the death was relatively sudden and the dead person was in otherwise good health, cadaver blood remains usable, as Dr. Shamov discovered, for up to six hours.

Wisdom is not having God's perspective of the whole matter before us, but having God's perspective about what next response will honor Him while keeping us still usable to Him.

We need to transform all the “stuff” we’ve attracted and accumulated into a clear inventory of meaningful actions, projects, and usable information.

Usability’s strength is in identifying problems, while design’s strength is in identifying solutions.

if you're going to waste time getting lost on the words you don't like instead of going, is there a part of this message that's usable for me?

My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.

We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

Amazon’s rise was a surprise not because it became an “everything store” (not hard to imagine), but because Amazon’s customers (me and you) rushed to write the reviews that made the site’s long-tail selection usable. Today,

On a far-wandering walk a thousand useful and usable thoughts occur to me, while shut in at home, I would lamentably wither and dry up. Walking is for me not only healthy, and lovely, it is also of service - not only lovely, but also useful. A walk advances me professionally, and provides me at the same time with amusement and joy; it conforts, delights and refreshes me, is a pleasure for me, but also has the peculiarity that it spurs me on and allures me to further creation, since it offers me as material numerous more or less significant objectivities upon which I can later work industriously at home. Every walk is filled with phenomena valuable to see and feel.

The Joel Test 1. Do you use source control? 2. Can you make a build in one step? 3. Do you make daily builds? 4. Do you have a bug database? 5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? 6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? 7. Do you have a spec? 8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? 9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? 10. Do you have testers? 11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? 12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

Christians actually need to be confronted by their real need-an understanding of God's holiness and their own sinfulness-so they can be usable to Him for His Glory. When we have a right relationship to God, every aspect of our lives will settle into its divinely ordained place. ... We are still to need other needs but it begins with a high view of God.

Sometimes time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But sometimes it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.

How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And by remaining swift and usable and resolutely modest, they are saving thousands upon thousands of lives. *

[George] Steiner makes two other points worth mentioning about the consequences of language abuse: as usable words are lost, experience becomes cruder and less communicable. And with the loss of the subtlety, clarity, and reliability of language, we become more vulnerable to crude exercises of power.

The other thing that I would say about writer's block is that it can be very, very subjective. By which I mean, you can have one of those days when you sit down and every word is crap. It is awful. You cannot understand how or why you are writing, what gave you the illusion or delusion that you would every have anything to say that anybody would ever want to listen to. You're not quite sure why you're wasting your time. And if there is one thing you're sure of, it's that everything that is being written that day is rubbish. I would also note that on those days (especially if deadlines and things are involved) is that I keep writing. The following day, when I actually come to look at what has been written, I will usually look at what I did the day before, and think, "That's not quite as bad as I remember. All I need to do is delete that line and move that sentence around and its fairly usable. It's not that bad." What is really sad and nightmarish (and I should add, completely unfair, in every way. And I mean it -- utterly, utterly, unfair!) is that two years later, or three years later, although you will remember very well, very clearly, that there was a point in this particular scene when you hit a horrible Writer's Block from Hell, and you will also remember there was point in this particular scene where you were writing and the words dripped like magic diamonds from your fingers -- as if the Gods were speaking through you and every sentence was a thing of beauty and magic and brilliance. You can remember just as clearly that there was a point in the story, in that same scene, when the characters had turned into pathetic cardboard cut-outs and nothing they said mattered at all. You remember this very, very clearly. The problem is you are now doing a reading and you cannot for the life of you remember which bits were the gifts of the Gods and dripped from your fingers like magical words and which bits were the nightmare things you just barely created and got down on paper somehow!! Which I consider most unfair. As a writer, you feel like one or the other should be better. I wouldn't mind which. I'm not somebody who's saying, "I really wish the stuff from the Gods was better." I wouldn't mind which way it went. I would just like one of them to be better. Rather than when it's a few years later, and you're reading the scene out loud and you don't know, and you cannot tell. It's obviously all written by the same person and it all gets the same kind of reaction from an audience. No one leaps up to say, "Oh look, that paragraph was clearly written on an 'off' day." It is very unfair. I don't think anybody who isn't a writer would ever understand how quite unfair it is.

There was the matter of the withered-looking and bradyauxetic arms, which just as in a hair-raising case of Volkmann’s contracture 115 curled out in front of his thorax in magiscule S’s and were usable for rudimentary knifeless eating and slapping at doorknobs until they sort of turned just enough and doors could be kicked open and

In the last few years, making things more usable has become almost everybody’s responsibility. Visual designers and developers now often find themselves doing things like interaction design (deciding what happens next when the user clicks, taps, or swipes) and information architecture (figuring out how everything should be organized). I

Or as Jakob Nielsen so aptly put it: The human brain’s capacity doesn’t change from one year to the next, so the insights from studying human behavior have a very long shelf life. What was difficult for users twenty years ago continues to be difficult today. I

Every element in a design should be expressed to the extent necessary, but not beyond the extent necessary. Excess is noise.

It is important to avoid trying to create something that is average in all dimensions.

Intuitive design happens when current knowledge is the same as the target knowledge.

The name of the page will match the words I clicked to get there. In

Usable designs are not necessarily enjoyable to use.

learning helps us increase our store of usable information and lower risk.

The aesthetic-usability effect describes a phenomenon in which people perceive more-aesthetic designs as easier to use than less-aesthetic designs—whether they are or not.

Sometimes your medicine bottle has on it, "Shake well before using." That is what God has to do with some of His people. He has to shake them well before they are ever usable.” ~Vance Havner

Usability is de mate waarin een product door bepaalde gebruikers in een bepaalde gebruikersomgeving kan worden gebruikt om bepaalde doelen effectief, efficiënt en naar tevredenheid te bereiken.

There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance. The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. The signal is an attack.

The important lesson here is that wisdom is not having God’s perspective of the whole matter before us, but having God’s perspective about what next response will honor Him while keeping us still usable to Him.

successful parenting is not about achieving goals (that you have no power to produce) but about being a usable and faithful tool in the hands of the One who alone is able to produce good things in your children.

Usability, fundamentally, is a matter of bringing a bit of human rights into the world of computer-human interaction. It's a way to let our ideals shine through in our software, no matter how mundane the software is. You may think that you're stuck in a boring, drab IT department making mind-numbing inventory software that only five lonely people will ever use. But you have daily opportunities to show respect for humanity even with the most mundane software.

The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts to describe users in terms of one-dimensional likes and dislikes are futile and counter-productive. Good design, on the other hand, takes this complexity into account.

Small quantities of non-weapons-grade radioactive plutonium can be used to power radioisotope thermoelectric generators (sensibly abbreviated as RTGs) for spacecraft that travel to the outer solar system, where the intensity of sunlight has diminished below the level usable by solar panels. One pound of plutonium will generate a half million kilowatt-hours of heat energy, enough to continuously power a household blender for a hundred years, or a human being for five times as long, if we ran on nuclear fuel instead of grocery-store food.

CONCERNED AS HE is that the usable be put to use, that there be no waste, still there is nothing utilitarian or mechanistic about Mr. Lapp’s farm—or his mind. His aim, it seems, is not that the place should be put to the fullest use, but that it should have the most abundant life.

Creeping featurism is the tendency to add to the number of features of a product, often extending the number beyond all reason. There is no way that a product can remain usable and understandable by the time it has all of those special-purpose features that have been added in over time.

The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all the images of memory) are lacking in sense, but they reveal a certain stammering greatness. They allow us to make out dimly, or to infer, the dizzying world of Funes

You have the resources within you, and now you know the elements needed in incubation to make your faith usable. Get a clear-cut goal and objective. Have a desire that burns to the boiling point, then pray until you have the substance, the assurance. Then begin to speak the word about which you have been given assurance.

Women have complained, justly, about the behavior of “macho” men. But despite their he-man pretensions and their captivation by masculine heroes of sports, war, and the Old West, most men are now entirely accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses. Because of this, of course, they hate their jobs — they mutter, “Thank God it’s Friday” and “Pretty good for Monday”— but they do as they are told. They are more compliant than most housewives have been. Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness. They have accepted almost without protest, and often with relief, their dispossession of any usable property and, with that, their loss of economic independence and their consequent subordination to bosses. They have submitted to the destruction of the household economy and thus of the household, to the loss of home employment and self-employment, to the disintegration of their families and communities, to the desecration and pillage of their country, and they have continued abjectly to believe, obey, and vote for the people who have most eagerly abetted this ruin and who have most profited from it. These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money, and so for money they do whatever they are told.

Could I see that God wanted to transform my life from a somewhat ugly, useless branch to an arrow, a tool usable in His hands, for the furtherance of His purposes?....To be thus transformed, was I willing - am I till willing - for the whittling, sandpapering, stripping, processes necessary in my Christian life? The ruthless pulling off of leaves and flowers might include doing without a television set or washing machine, remaining single in order to see a job done, re-evaluating the worthiness of the ambition to be a "good" doctor (according to my terms an values). The snapping of thorns might include drastic dealing with hidden jealousies and unknown prides, giving up prized rights in leadership and administration. The final stripping of the bark might include lessons to be learned regarding death to self - self-defence,self-pity, self-justification, self-vinidication, self-sufficiency, all the mechanisms of preventing the hurt of too deep involvment. Am I prepared for the pain, which may at times seem like sacrifice, in order to be made a tool in His service? My willingness will be a measure of the sincerity of my desire to express my heartfelt gratitude to Him for his so-great salvation. Can I see such minor "sacrifices" in light of the great sacrifice of Calvary, where Christ gave all for me?

As electrical energy can create mechanical vibrations (perceived as sound by the human ear), so in turn can mechanical vibrations create electrical energy, such as the previously mentioned ball lightning. It could be theorized, therefore, that with the Earth being a source for mechanical vibration, or sound, and the vibrations being of a usable amplitude and frequency, then the Earth's vibrations could be a source of energy that we could tap into. Moreover, if we were to discover that a structure with a certain shape, such as a pyramid, was able to effectively act as a resonator for the vibrations coming from within the Earth, then we would have a reliable and inexpensive source of energy.

Demonstrate ROI. In this approach, you gather and analyze data to prove that a usability change you’ve made resulted in cost savings or additional revenue (“Changing the label on this button increased sales by 0.25%”). There’s an excellent book about it: Cost-justifying Usability: An Update for the Internet Age, edited by Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew.

Advance organizers are brief chunks of information—spoken, written, or illustrated—presented prior to new material to help facilitate learning and understanding.

Wat de bezoeker gewend is op internet, is meestal het beste.

Meestal zijn er grote delen van de pagina die niet eens bekeken worden door de bezoeker! Hij keurt ze letterlijk geen blik waardig.

Multimediacomponenten moeten de krenten in de pap zijn. Gebruik multimedia daarom als ondersteuning op de website. Niet om de primaire boodschap van de site over te brengen.

Een handicap is dichterbij dan u denkt. Probeer maar eens een website te bedienen met een gebroken pols of RSI-klachten.

Minder is meer. Er zijn héél veel interactieve toepassingen beschikbaar op internet. De kunst is om hieruit een bewuste keuze te maken.

Wanneer u beschikt over een beperkt budget of u hebt een deadline die angstig snel nadert, concentreer u dan op de belangrijkste richtlijnen.

and home isn't here and home isn't there

so it came time and no day like that is ever good in the coming

Everything gets more and more absurd.

More and more it's deliciousness I want but all the time there's less of it.

How long can I sit here not doing the thing I want to do.

I am always nighttime on the inside barefoot and heretic

every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand.

Like a moth, Rene was attracted to the flame of fame

immaculate middle-of-the-night quiet rainlessness the late moony sadness of the one specific mosquito dear someone you habituate me to the invisible I exit through you not as myself

Faced with the prospect of following a convention, there’s a great temptation for designers to try reinventing the wheel instead, largely because they feel (not incorrectly) that they’ve been hired to do something new and different, not the same old thing. Not to mention the fact that praise from peers, awards, and high-profile job offers are rarely based on criteria like “best use of conventions.” Occasionally, time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But usually it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.

Reconciling empire and liberty - based on the violent taking of Indigenous lands - into a usable myth allowed for the emergence of an enduring populist imperialism. Wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing could be sold to "the people" - indeed could be fought for by the young men of those very people - by promising to expand economic opportunity, democracy, and freedom for all.

Elke webpagina van de site heeft een uithangbord waaraan de bezoeker herkent waar hij terecht is gekomen. Een goed uithangbord bestaat uit de combinatie van een logo, een slagzin en een paginatitel.

The reality is that in the business world almost everyone is just a very small cog in a huge collection of cogs.2 2 Sorry. Try not to take it personally. Do good work. Enjoy your home life. Be happy.

Millions of people across the world live in a state of acute environmental crises caused by the lack of access to safe and usable water resources, because of natural disasters, socio-economic conditions, wars and conflicts. At Green the Gene, we are developing extremely simple yet highly technology and data intensive solutions tailored to address extremely specific problems faced by communities.

Ronald Mace, a wheelchair user who became an architect devoted to the theory and practice of accessible architecture, is credited with introducing the term universal design to the public in 1985. In part, the coinage was strategic, recasting features of design that had been considered “special” as simply good design, resulting in products and buildings that were straightforwardly “usable by all people.

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

I slip into the seat behind hers and take a mouthful of the coffee, wincing at the heat. “Apologies. I neglected to eat supper.” “I neglected to eat supper,” Pytha repeats, mocking my accent. Born on the Palantine Hill of Luna, I have lamentably inherited the most egregiously stereotypical highLingo accents. Apparently others find it hilarious. “Haven’t we servants to spoon-feed His Majesty supper?” “Oh, shut your gory gob,” I say, modulating my voice to mimic the Thessalonican bravado. “Better?” “Eerily so.” “Skipping supper. No wonder you’re a little twig,” Cassius says, pinching my arm. “I daresay you don’t even weigh a hundred ten kilos, my goodman.” “It’s usable weight,” I protest. “In any matter, I was reading.” He looks at me blankly. “You have your priorities. I have mine, muscly creature. So piss off.

Het grote voordeel van het web is tegelijkertijd ook het nadeel. Zeer veel informatie is snel beschikbaar voor velen, maar de voorwaarde voor het gebruik is dat de geboden informatie toegankelijk en overzichtelijk geschreven wordt.

In the working of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.

with his words in my head I slept for thirty or forty forevers while the grass shrieked and the trees tremored it was crazy letting my youth pass like that giving myself up to the abstract fears balconies collapsing over the east river as far as the eye could see until all is miniature wind over water without end when I am dead I will have something to say about death & all the men stretched out a girl must be a graveyard I am a descendant of fields and want to keep my mind off it, especially

It is not just the different plants and animals that define the environment. There are all sorts of physical factors as well. Take the atmosphere, for instance. The oxygen levels became usable to us about 400 million years ago, but since then there has been a great variation in the oxygen levels. In the late Jurassic it is possible that the oxygen levels were about 35%, as opposed to 20% at the present day. Indeed this figure has been put forward to explain the survival of the very big dinosaurs, high oxygen concentrations in the breathing air being able to keep the great volumes of tissue oxygenated. On the other hand the proportion of carbon dioxide was also high. This may account for the prolific plant life at the time, carbon dioxide being essential for the good growth of plants. The difference between the composition of the Jurassic atmosphere and that of your own time may make it difficult for you to breathe when you first arrive, but your body will probably adapt to it before long.

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”—William Zinsser, On Writing Well

In any case, even if a usability test resolves a dispute, it doesn't do it in any kind of a statistically valid way. Unless you test thousands of people from all walks of life under all kinds of conditions, something that not even Microsoft can afford to do, you are not actually getting statistically meaningful results. Remember, the real strength of usability tests is in finding truffles—finding the broken bits so you can fix them. Actually looking at the results as if they were statistics is just not justified.

How did the age-old equation that poor equals thin and rich equals fat change so that now our working poor are huge and slow-moving and only the wealthy can afford the personal trainers, liposuction, and extended spa treatments required, it seems, to be thin?

Als een site is voorzien van een elegant design maar verder niet bruikbaar is, zal de site falen. Het omgekeerde is echter ook van toepassing! Als een site perfect bruikbaar is maar is voorzien van een volkomen ongeïnspireerd en oersaai non-design, zal hij eveneens falen.

The problem is, the rewards and the costs of adding more things to the Home page aren’t shared equally. The section that’s being promoted gets a huge gain in traffic, while the overall loss in effectiveness of the Home page as it gets more cluttered is shared by all sections.

When nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted. Once the values of things refer only to their future usefulness, then an infinite withdrawal of value from the living present has begun. Nothing (and nobody) can then exist that is not theoretically replaceable by something (or somebody) more valuable. The country that we (or some of us) had thought to make our home becomes instead 'a nation rich in natural resources'; the good bounty of the land begins its mechanical metamorphosis into junk, garbage, silt, poison, and other forms of 'waste.' "The inevitable result of such an economy is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime's devotion. 'Waste,' in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans--the unborn, the old, 'disinvested' farmers, the unemployed, the 'unemployable.' Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ash heap or the dump.

Governments and business-news promoters go to great pains to make things easy for news organizations. They provide the media organizations with facilities in which to gather; they give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports; they schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines; they write press releases in usable language; and they carefully organize their press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions. It is the job of news officers "to meet the journalist's scheduled needs with material that their beat agency has generated at its own pace.

Software tends to be either so powerful that its wealth of features is buried to all but the most intrepid explorers (think Excel) or so specific that it sacrifices features for increased usability, essentially doing few things very well (think mobile apps). In both cases, they force you to operate within a framework of their choosing. This is the main challenge with many productivity systems: They struggle to address the limitless variability and evolutionary nature of our individual needs. Notebooks, in contrast, are beholden to their authors. Their function is limited only by the imagination of their owner.

Grateful was the teacher rescued by Elwood’s contributions when the classroom fell drowsy with the afternoon heat and he offered up Archimedes or Amsterdam at the key moment. The boy had one usable volume of Fisher’s Universal Encyclopedia, so he used it, what else could he do? Better than nothing. Skipping around, wearing it down, revisiting his favorite parts as if it were one of his adventure tales. As a story, the encyclopedia was disjointed and incomplete, but still exciting in its own right. Elwood filled his notebook with the good parts, definitions and etymology. Later he’d find this scrap-rummaging pathetic.

In my university, copying machines are purchased by the Printing and Duplicating Center, then dispersed to the various departments. The copiers are purchased after a formal “request for proposals” has gone out to manufacturers and dealers of machines. The selection is almost always based solely on price, plus a consideration of the cost of maintenance. Usability? Not considered. The state of California requires by law that universities purchase things on a price basis; there are no legal requirements regarding understandability or usability of the product. That is one reason we get unusable copying machines and telephone systems.

had tall windows and a usable, if narrow, balcony, with a view down an alley and straight up a boulevard to a dry fountain that once gushed and sparkled in the sunlight. It was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict, when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians. War would soon erode the facade of their building as though it had accelerated time itself, a day’s toll outpacing that of a decade.

We could look at the upcoming day and despair at all the things we don’t control: other people, our health, the temperature, the outcome of a project once it leaves our hands. Or we could look out at that very same day and rejoice at the one thing we do control: the ability to decide what any event means. This second option offers the ultimate power—a true and fair form of control. If you had control over other people, wouldn’t other people have control over you? Instead, what you’ve been granted is the fairest and most usable of trump cards. While you don’t control external events, you retain the ability to decide how you respond to those events. You control what every external event means to you personally.

The Unravel process is like cleaning out that garage. Before I could park a car in that space, I had to go through everything that was occupying that area and separate out what needed to be kept and what needed to be thrown out. I had to pick up the garden hose and see if it was still usable. I had to go through every box and investigate what was in it. I had to go through all the miscellaneous stuff and decide if I needed it, if it could be donated, or if it should be thrown out. I asked myself why I was keeping some of the things I had piled up. I realized that some of it was being kept out of a sense of loyalty or sentimentality, and some of it was being kept because I was afraid that I might need it and wouldn’t have it.

It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx. It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall. But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism. This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.

A good designer should constantly be looking for opportunities to learn from others’ mistakes. Instead of blaming the protagonists, we should try to put ourselves in their shoes and honestly answer these questions: What would lead me to design the same interface they did? What decisions led to this product being approved and shipped? How can I avoid finding myself in a similar position in the future?

There are a number of advantages to moving yourself, with saving money being number one. I have done professional loading and unloading for countless shippers. Most were looking at savings of approximately fifty percent when all expenses were considered. These were people who were moving mostly 8,000 pound or less of furniture (household goods)-- the weight of the contents of the average small three-bedroom home and the maximum usable (as opposed to advertised) capacity of the largest rental trucks. Moving yourself has other advantages too. Weather and road conditions permitting, the move will go on your schedule. You won’t have to worry about coordinating with your movers for delivery because you are the movers. There is also the security of knowing exactly where your stuff is with no worries about delays, mixed-up shipments or theft.

Gerlitz, Claudia Förster, and fifteen-year-old Jutta Pfennig—are transported from Essen to Berlin to work in a machine parts factory. For ten hours a day, six days a week, they disassemble massive forging presses and stack the usable metal in crates to be loaded onto train cars. Unscrewing, sawing, hauling. Most days Frau Elena works close by, wearing a torn ski jacket she has found, mumbling to herself in French or singing songs from childhood. They live above a printing company abandoned a month before. Hundreds of crates of misprinted dictionaries are stacked in the halls, and the girls burn them page by page in the potbelly stove. Yesterday Dankeswort, Dankesworte, Dankgebet, Dankopfer. Today Frauenverband, Frauenverein, Frauenvorsteher, Frauenwahlrecht. For meals they have cabbage and barley in the factory canteen at noon, endless ration lines

This assembly," Roy continued, "has a Penfield unit built into it. When the alarm has been triggered it radiates a mood of panic to the — intruder. Unless he acts very fast, which he may. Enormous panic; I have the gain turned all the way up. No human being can remain in the vicinity more than a matter of seconds. That's the nature of panic: it leads to random circus-motions, purposeless flight, and muscle and neural spasms." He concluded, "Which will give us an opportunity to get him. Possibly. Depending on how good he is." Isidore said, "Won't the alarm affect us?" "That's right," Pris said to Roy Baty. "It'll affect Isidore." "Well, so what," Roy said. And resumed his task of installation. "So they both go racing out of here panic-stricken. It'll still give us time to react. And they won't kill Isidore; he's not on their list. That's why he's usable as a cover." Pris said brusquely, "You can't do any better, Roy?" "No," he answered, "I can't.

When designing for digital mediums, it’s easy to become detached from how design decisions affect the end user. The word “user” itself can be a vehicle for that detachment. When the “user” doesn’t have a face and a name, it becomes a formless concept, blending in with other quantitative metrics and taking on any assumed needs to justify business decisions. It quickly becomes a number on a crowded dashboard, and its reaction to the product is just another metric to consider in an effort to increase revenue.

The English departments were clogged with worthy but outworn and backwardlooking scholars whose tastes in the moderns were most often superficial, random, and vulgar. Students who. wanted to write got little practical help from their professors. They studied the classics as monsters that were slowly losing their fur and feathers and leaking a little sawdust. What one did oneself was all chance and shallowness, and no profession seemed wispier and less needed than that of the poet. My own group, that of Tate and Ransom, was all for the high discipline, for putting on the full armor of the past, for making poetry something that would take a man's full weight and that would bear his complete intelligence, passion, and subtlety. Almost anything, the Greek and Roman classics, Elizabethan dramatic poetry, seventeenth-century metaphysical verse, old and modern critics, aestheticians and philosophers, could be suppled up and again made necessary. The struggle perhaps centered on making the old metrical forms usable again to express the depths of one's experience.

OPTIONS FOR REDUCING While thrift stores such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army can be a convenient way to initially let go, many other outlets exist and are often more appropriate for usable items. Here are some examples: • Amazon.com • Antiques shops • Auction houses • Churches • Consignment shops (quality items) • Craigslist.org (large items, moving boxes, free items) • Crossroads Trading Co. (trendy clothes) • Diggerslist.com (home improvement) • Dress for Success (workplace attire) • Ebay.com (small items of value) • Flea markets • Food banks (food) • Freecycle.org (free items) • Friends • Garage and yard sales • Habitat for Humanity (building materials, furniture, and/or appliances) • Homeless and women’s shelters • Laundromats (magazines and laundry supplies) • Library (books, CDs and DVDs) • Local SPCA (towels and sheets) • Nurseries and preschools (blankets, toys) • Operation Christmas Child (new items in a shoe box) • Optometrists (eyeglasses) • Regifting • Rummage sales for a cause • Salvage yards (building materials) • Schools (art supplies, magazines, dishes to eliminate class party disposables) • Tool co-ops (tools) • Waiting rooms (magazines) • Your curb with a “Free” sign

Concern for one's political community is, of course, right and proper, and Christians can hardly be faulted for wishing to correct their nation's deficiencies. At the same time, this variety of Christian nationalism errs on at least four counts. First, it unduly applies biblical promises intended for the body of Christ as a whole to one of many particular geographic concentrations of people bound together under a common political framework. Once again this requires a somewhat dubious biblical hermeneutic. Second, it tends to identify God's norms for political and cultural life with a particular, imperfect manifestation of those norms at a specific period of a nation's history. Thus, for example, pro-family political activists tend to identify God's norms for healthy family life with the nineteenth-century agrarian family or the mid-twentieth-century suburban nuclear family. Similarly, a godly commonwealth is believed by American Christian nationalists to consist of a constitutional order limiting political power through a system of checks and balances, rather than one based on, in Walter Bagehot's words, a "fusion of powers" in the hands of a cabinet responsible to a parliament. Thus Christian nationalists, like their conservative counterparts, tend to judge their nation's present actions, not by transcendent norms given by God for its life, but by precedents in their nation's history deemed to have embodied these norms. Third, Christian nationalists too easily pay to their nation a homage due only to God. They make too much of their country's symbols, institutions, laws and mores.They see its history as somehow revelatory of God's ways and are largely blind to the outworkings of sin in that same history. When they do detect national sin, they tend to attribute it not to something defective in the nation's ideological underpinnings, but to its departure from a once solid biblical foundation during an imagined pre-Fall golden age. If the nation's beginnings are not as thoroughly Christian as they would like to believe, they will seize whatever evidence is available in this direction and construct a usable past serviceable 34 to a more Christian future. Fourth, and finally, those Christians most readily employing the language of nationhood often find it difficult to conceive the nation in limited terms. Frequently, Christian nationalists see the nation as an undifferentiated community with few if any constraints on its claims to allegiance. 45 Once again this points to the recognition of a modest place for the nation, however it be defined, and away from the totalitarian pretensions of nationalism. Whether the nation is already linked to the body politic or to an ethnically defined people seeking political recognition, it must remain within the normative limits God has placed on everything in his creation.

I recognize magnesite.  From my explosives training years ago.  It’s a source of magnesium.” He muttered, turning the stone over and over in his hand.  “Correct again.  As you increase your Mining skill, you will eventually learn how to convert the raw ore into usable material.  Or you can simply purchase the Refining and Smelting skills.” Max shook his head.  “Assuming I ever make it to a settlement of some kind.” He stared harder at the stone.  “I am going to try something.  You might want to back up.” Stepping well back from the fire himself, he picked up a discarded leaf from one of his firewood sticks and laid it flat on the ground.  Using his thumbnail, he scraped at the magnesite vein inside the rock.  Initially he was very careful and slow, not wanting to create friction, and thus heat, as he scratched.  A few small particles dropped onto the leaf.  Another two minutes of careful scraping, and he had accumulated a tiny pile of the mineral, about the size of a pea.  Setting the stone down, he carefully wrapped the leaf around the magnesite dust. “Alright, here goes nothing.” He took another step back from the fire, then gently tossed the leaf bundle into it.  There was a brief delay, then a bright white flash as the heat reached the magnesite dust and a molten flame shot upward for about two seconds. Skill level increase!  Your Mining skill has increased by +1! Max uttered is best evil overlord laugh.  “Muah ha ha!

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The real improvements then must come, to a considerable extent, from the local communities themselves. We need local revision of our methods of land use and production. We need to study and work together to reduce scale, reduce overhead, reduce industrial dependencies; we need to market and process local products locally; we need to bring local economies into harmony with local ecosystems so that we can live and work with pleasure in the same places indefinitely; we need to substitute ourselves, our neighborhoods, our local resources, for expensive imported goods and services; we need to increase cooperation among all local economic entities: households, farms, factories, banks, consumers, and suppliers. If. we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide "jobs" to the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non- polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. In that way, we will put local capital to work locally, not to exploit and destroy the land but to use it well. This is not work just for the privileged, the well-positioned, the wealthy, and the powerful. It is work for everybody. I acknowledge that to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession-not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting and destroying their homeland. The great, greedy, indifferent national and international economy is killing rural America, just as it is killing America's cities--it is killing our country. Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community. All true patriots must find ways of opposing it. --1991

How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========

The purpose of product discovery is to address these critical risks: Will the customer buy this, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk) Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk)

Though the ones who had come before them had slowly developed and improved various implements and tools, the people like Jondalar and Ayla were the first to imagine and innovate to such an extravagant degree. Their brains could make abstractions easily. They were capable of conceiving of an idea and planning how to implement it. Beginning with simple objects that utilized advanced principles that were intuitively understood, they drew conclusions and applied them in other circumstances. They did more than invent usable tools, they invented science. And from the same wellspring of creativity, utilizing that same power to abstract, they were the first people to see the world around them in symbolic form, to extract its essence and reproduce it; they originated art.

In the 1980s, in writing The Design of Everyday Things, I didn’t take emotions into account. I addressed utility and usability, function and form, all in a logical, dispassionate way—even though I am infuriated by poorly designed objects. But now I’ve changed. Why? In part because of new scientific advances in our understanding of the brain and of how emotion and cognition are thoroughly intertwined.

T4 from the thyroid must be converted to T3 before the body can use it. In the end, however, only about 60 percent of T4 is converted into a usable form of T3. Twenty percent becomes reverse T3 (rT3), which is permanently inactive. Levels of rT3 can become too high in times of major trauma, surgery, or severe chronic illness. Another 20 percent of T4 becomes T3 sulfate and T3 acetic acid, which have the potential to become useful if acted upon by healthy bacteria in the digestive tract. The remaining T4 is converted to T3 in the liver and in muscle, heart, and nerve cells.

In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether customers will buy it), usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have), and business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business—sales, marketing, finance, legal, etc.).

More than half of commercially usable cobalt comes from a single country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (a near-dictatorial place that is neither democratic nor a republic nor all that far from being outright failed). Much of that production is generated illegally, with artisanal miners (a fancy term to describe individuals who grab a shovel, climb over barbed wire, and evade shoot-on-sight guards in order to scrape out a few bits of ore) selling their output to Chinese middlemen for pennies.

Why people churn Most churn occurs at the time of the sale. In 2017, my churn was over 60%. I signed up customers who were a poor fit for my solution. Many customers thought Connex was an inventory management tool and others thought we built custom software. We had no onboarding process and we expected users to figure out Connex on their own. Many users failed to choose the right settings, since they are small business owners and not accountants. Since the software failed to work as expected, they quickly cancelled. From experience, most users churn in the first 30 days. It is critical that you reach out to them and ensure the software works correctly. My staff performs an onboarding and ensures Connex works to the customer’s satisfaction. Users churned because my software lacked features that it has today. We noticed a dramatic shift in churn, after implementing a sales and marketing process. In the first quarter of 2021, we had only a handful of refunds out of 100 purchases. People churn because they fail to achieve their desired result or experience. People buy Connex because they want accurate financial information, better order fulfillment, or protection from overselling. If the sync were inaccurate and unreliable then we would lose customers. In other cases, your software may become superfluous. For example, I used the excellent meeting automation tool Calendly. When I migrated to HubSpot, however, I no longer needed Calendly because HubSpot offered meeting automation as part of its suite of offerings. Even if your tool works, your customer’s desired situation or desired outcomes may change. I churned from my ticketing system because I was unhappy with the customer service and experienced technical issues with their chat and phone system. Companies often tack on features that are nowhere near as usable as their core offering.

Gotta replace your IV,” he said, lightly pinching her nipple. She gasped. “Nobody puts IVs there.” “You were in a terrible accident, it was the only usable part.” “How am I even alive, then?

Design for individuals and the results may be wonderful for the particular people they were designed for, but a mismatch for others. Design for activities and the result will be usable by everyone.

The purpose of product discovery is to address these critical risks: Will the customer buy this, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk) Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk) And it's not enough that it's just the product manager's opinion on these questions. We need to collect evidence.

The first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.

Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug is an excellent introduction to web usability. We passionately believe it should be on the school curriculum. Designed for Use by Lukas Mathis is less entertaining than Don’t Make Me Think, but it covers more usability concepts. If this book list seems worryingly short, that’s a testament to how much ground this book covers. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte contains many examples of complex data shown in beautifully elegant ways. Don’t be put off by its technical-sounding title. It’s fun to read.

Why are so many designers “usability blind”? If you’re a sadist with a technical bent, you will enjoy running usability tests. During tests, we see users caught in wild-goose chases, scratching their heads, and sometimes swearing or even hitting their keyboards. Why do marketers make websites that cause people to punch peripherals? Because marketers are afflicted with the curse of knowledge, a cognitive bias that makes it extremely difficult to think about a problem from the perspective of someone who’s less informed. Marketers spend so long looking at their own websites, they can’t imagine what it would be like to see the website for the first time. As a result, the website’s users appear to be stupid. It’s a compelling illusion. But look at it another way: Our users desired something. We created a website to satisfy that desire. And our users still can’t get what they desire. Now who’s stupid? How can you overcome the curse of knowledge? Design your processes for what you perceive to be a busy, lazy, drunk, amnesiac idiot—what lawyers call a “moron in a hurry” (really). Even geniuses with time on their hands will be grateful that you did.

(Each additional dam that is built on the Colorado, incidentally, reduces the quantity of usable water, because of unavoidable losses through evaporation and percolation into the porous sandstone containing the reservoirs.)

As the repressed dark material rises, the practitioner is likely to experience frightening visions, feelings of terror, rage, uncontrollable ego reactions, and countless other usually minor but annoying and embarrassing manifestations. These reactions must be expected and properly dealt with: they should neither be blown out of proportion nor minimized and avoided. Instead, it should be recognized that these eruptions of the dark side can be of great benefit for one's self-development. Ultimately, transforming these frightening visions into usable psychic energy is the only way to deal with them, and the nuances of this process of "turning lead into gold" will require every bit of skillful means that the practitioner possesses.

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable Form.You've got to have models in your head.

Good architectures are centered on use cases so that architects can safely describe the structures that support those use cases without committing to frameworks, tools, and environments. Again, consider the plans for a house. The first concern of the architect is to make sure that the house is usable—not to ensure that the house is made of bricks. Indeed, the architect takes pains to ensure that the homeowner can make decisions about the exterior material (bricks, stone, or cedar) later, after the plans ensure that the use cases are met.

Eco-friendly stores are those that do not have a negative impact on the environment. These are items created entirely of natural and organic materials. They're also packaged in biodegradable or cotton-based materials. Let's take a look at all of the eco-friendly home products we have used in your home right now to help save the earth. How many times a billion annually would you go looking for different clothes? Do you ever put off wearing new clothes because you don't think they're fashionable? Clarkia Home is a store that sells fashionable clothing, recyclable products, and a lot of trash. Clarkia Home was a well-known brand in the anti-fast fashion movement, providing recyclable and reusable products. This ethical clothing brand offers long-lasting fashion at an affordable price that may be worn throughout the year. With a little attention, the everyday item may be transformed into a remarkable design statement. In the kitchen products, you most likely keep recycling or recycling more than is essential. You've decided to start buying eco-friendly kitchen products in order to save money in your home. It is true that it is not always simple. With a few minor changes, though, it is possible to achieve. Here are some eco-friendly home products to assist you in achieving your goal of a completely green kitchen. Strap with elastic: Cotton Reusable Bags with Large Handles Drawstring These beautiful Re - usable Organic Sacks are one of Clarkia Home's best known Recyclable products.

This body is a scrounger if it needs the state, a faker if it holds down a job. It is the reject of capitalist productivity, all the while working harder than any FTSE 100 CEO. This body is one in five, full of potential, untapped and waiting. It is ready to burst, to make its mark, if only the trains were accessible, personal assistants funded and housing usable. It is just not trying hard enough.

Permeable Pavers are a form of pavement with a high porosity that allows rainfall to drain into the earth beneath it. Our commercial permeable interlocking concrete pavers combine strength, usability, and environmental sensitivity into a single appealing package.

Demonstrated: The team has demonstrated this feature to the rest of the team, the on-site user, the requirements analyst, the system tester, and the usability expert. This helps us catch usability issues early so they don’t show up in system test or (even worse) user acceptance test.

All classes draw from a Resource Pool. Resources regenerate through aetherium absorption, but each has its own benefits and drawbacks. Depending on the Resource chosen, aetherium may remain as a usable Resource. Available Resources may be suboptimal choices, and their availability depends on various, non-Class-based factors.

I get it. Who wants to contribute more to the buildup of the world's "trash mountains" than necessary?... The undeniable fact is that every object in your home already exists. The resources have already been pulled out of the earth and manufactured into something. If you can't recycle it, presumably it's never going to become usable raw materials again... It is already taking up space... namely inside your home. If you send it to the landfill, it will be taking up an equal amount of space in a location...designated for disposal and...to protect the public well-being. Let your regret about how much you have to throw away reinforce your determination not to buy so much in the future.

A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to explaining what makes us great.

When you think you will not remember something, you write it down, either in a notebook or on a handy piece of paper. You have many pieces of paper all over the house and in all sorts of pockets and bags with things written on them that you either don’t remember or do, also, remember—either do not have in your mind also or do have in your mind also. So the pieces of paper with writing on them supplement the living tissue of your memory, as though your usable, active memory goes beyond the bounds of your head out onto these pieces of paper.

At last!" he said. "My good sir! This is remarkable!" (Although in Trob the last word in fact became "a thing which may happen but once in the usable lifetime of a canoe hallowed diligently by ax and fire from the tallest diamondwood tree that grows in the noted diamondwood forests on the lower slopes of Mount Awayawa, home of the firegods or so it is said.")

The wise find pleasure in using a product until it is no longer usable; the foolish, in replacing an old but still usable product with a brand new one.

Other than our 'mind', what is it that we have, which we can call our own? Everything else is gifted by nature and made usable by science. At the same time, if you talk of joy of mind, it lies in "art". But then it is difficult to understand that in this process, where do we feel the need for these 'so-called religions'?

One way to look at design—any kind of design—is that it’s essentially about constraints (things you have to do and things you can’t do) and tradeoffs (the less-than-ideal choices you make to live within the constraints).

Having something pinned down can have a focusing effect, where a blank canvas with its unlimited options—while it sounds liberating—can have a paralyzing effect.

That power which rules us from inside, when it is in its natural state, stands in such a way in relation to whatever may happen that it easily adapts itself at all times both to its own capabilities and what it has been given by fate. For it is not attracted toward one kind of material thing or event but adapts itself to all internal and external limitations, whether those limitations are due to ability or fate. Nevertheless, it converts into usable fuel anything that opposes it, just as fire does when it consumes what is thrown upon it, by which a small fire would have been extinguished. But a blazing fire quickly assimilates to itself whatever is cast upon it, engulfing it as fuel and rising even higher because of it.

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. —CHARLIE MUNGER, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (USC) BUSINESS SCHOOL, 1994

What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.

2 Snow discovered that more than five hundred deaths from cholera had occurred within a ten-day period, and the victims were people who had consumed water from the pump. Furthermore, when he persuaded the authorities to remove the handle so that the pump was no longer usable, the Soho outbreak suddenly ceased.

The root chakra is the source of your usable physical energy and anchors this energy into your physical manifestation.

here is an early version of principles established by a client adopting LeSS Huge in a product group: 1. The perfection goal is to have a releasable product all the time. Release stabilization periods need to be reduced and eventually eliminated. 2. Co-located, self-managing, cross-functional, Scrum teams are the basic organizational building block. Responsibility and accountability are on team level. 3. The majority of the teams are organized as customer-centric feature teams. 4. Product management steers the development through the Product Owner role. Release commitments are not forced on teams. 5. The line organization is cross-functional. The functional-specialized line organizations are gradually integrated in the cross-functional line organization. 6. Special coordination roles (such as project managers) are avoided and teams are responsible for coordination. 7. The main responsibility of management is improvement—improve team’s learning, efficiency, and quality. The content of the work always comes from the Product Owner. 8. There is no branching in development. And product variation is not to be reflected in the version control system. 9. All tests are automated with the exception of (1) exploratory test, (2) usability test, and (3) tests that require physical movement. All people must learn test automation skills. 10. Adoption is gradual and evolutionary. These principles are considered in every decision.

Second Law states, among other things, that the universe is running out of usable energy.

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A framework with all protected fields would be more immediately usable but harder to evolve later.

THE PLAN OF RECONCILIATION and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven. And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, (1:20-21) God’s ultimate plan for the universe is to reconcile all things to Himself through Jesus Christ. When His work of creation was finished, “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). God’s good creation, however, was soon marred by man’s sin. The Fall resulted not only in fatal and damning tragedy for the human race, but also affected the entire creation. Sin destroyed the perfect harmony between creatures, and between all creation and the Creator. The creation was “subjected to futility” (Rom. 8:20) and “groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom. 8:22). One evidence of that is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which indicates that the universe is losing its usable energy. If God did not intervene, the universe would eventually suffer a heat death—all available energy would be used up, and the universe would become uniformly cold and dark.

10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

Do you know that the average American contains about two-hundred-thousand usable calories?

The realization that no matter what you do, no matter how many little mistakes you make, you are still probably going to come up with reasonably good, usable compost.

We are a team of people who have been in the office design and refurbishment industry for many years, Nick Clarke is the founder and after selling his previous businesses chose to specialise helping carefully selected Clients who share a common goal. The goal we like to share is a desire to work as a team of people who are passionate about our environment and improving our businesses to function by means of the correct collaboration spaces, brand identity and great usable working spaces.

I see this again and again: A small group of customers makes noisy, persistent demands for new features that are too complicated for typical users. You’ll find it hard to convince your stakeholders (who are insiders and therefore experts) that the customers who are also experts (just like them) are not the ones you should listen to.

we also began an initiative called Velocity Product Development (VPD) that reimagined virtually every part of our development process with the goal of increasing sales. Working with our engineers and marketers, we analyzed the flow of projects through our system, identifying and fixing blockages with an eye toward improving speed. We took apart our development process step by step, improving everything about it—bringing marketing and engineering together from the very beginning, improving how usable our product designs were and how easy they were for our plants to manufacture, implementing rapid prototyping of our designs, and enhancing how we launched new products. We reduced the number of sign-offs new design changes required as they moved through the system, improved software development and testing, and enhanced our use of electronic design tools.

central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are usable. By this we mean products that are generally easy to learn, effective to use, and provide an enjoyable user experience.

Neo-fluxus, neo-dada, stuckism, experimental art, are noncontinuous, usable concepts.

How I Am Able To Envy You How I am able to envy you—the people of the day. He talked among you He walked beside you What a great feeling it must have been To see His face To touch His robe To hear His voice On that long ago road. How I am able to envy you—the three wise men. Who traveled by night and slept by day You took your pace and haste your way When you heard a Savior is born on that day What a great joy it must have been To fell before your knees in the presence of a new born King To offered Him gifts and sang Him hymn Blessed are you because you came. How I am able to envy you—the couple that invited His company. In response to His mother’s intercession He turned your water into wine What a great glory it must have been His first miracle you have seen You have tasted the sacredness of marriage And the abundance it brings You have tasted the sweetness of love That surpasses everything By His divine presence and His mother’s arrangement Christian marriage was raised to the dignity of a Sacrament. How I am able to envy you—the ones He cured. You deliberately stood at a distance Called in a loud voice and took your chance How it must have felt The light returning to your eyes The sound returning to your ears The strength returning to your feet The cleanse you longed to feel With all who came with the desire to be healed What a great feeling it must have been He opened your eyes with faith He opened your ears with truth And He opened your hearts with love A love born from His mercy and forgiveness. How I am able to envy you—the ones He raised to life. Experienced of a soul passing out of death Into fullness of life and liberty How it must have felt Life returning to your eyes Blood rush to your veins Air thrust to your lungs Waking from your sleep What a great feeling it must have been Having tasted death and knowing its defeat To rise to the life of grace and leave behind the grave of sin. How I am able to envy you—the penitent thief next to Him. At the very hour of your death Life flashes before your eyes Condemned justly for the sentence you received Refuse to lose your faith You see a light coming from His eyes Redeemed justly from the mercy you plead What a great glory it must have been The first beneficiary of God’s mercy you have obtained The eternal salvation which you have attained The reward too great you never expected to gain Reunited with Him in the paradise with joy and no more pain. How I am able to envy you—the seventy-two He sent out. His divine commission upon your head The power He bestowed The fire in your blood Your loyalty in His name The kindness in your heart The unceasing hope to succeed You performed miracles in His name What a great honor it must have been To be His hands and feet To be His ears and mouth To be His usable instrument On that triumphant and glorious moment. How I am able to envy you—the twelve He called His own Dine with Him Taught by Him Traveled beside Him Being with Him for years on end How I long to learn those words The way that you learned them from Him What a great feeling it must have been To touch and hold Him closed—as a Son of Man, as I never can.

It’s not men who cope with death; they resist, try to fight back and get their brains trampled out in consequence; where women just flank it, envelop it in one soft and instantaneous confederation of unresistance like cotton batting or cobwebs, already de-stingered and harmless, not merely reduced to size and usable but even useful like a penniless bachelor or spinster connection always available to fill an empty space or conduct an extra guest down to dinner.

By February 15 we will spread the empty sacks in the driveway in a big circle. In the middle we’ll pile provisions for the trail. I know from experience that the quantity of dog supplies will be shocking: seven hundred pounds of beef, six hundred of kibble, twenty-five hundred booties, to name a few. Everything will be bundled in small usable parcels. There will be 55 one-gallon bags of frozen beef sliced thin like pieces of bread. Thirty-five bags of salmon slices. A hundred and ten quart-sized bags holding five sets of booties in each. My musher supplies will also be plentiful. I’ll have packed thirty gallon-sized bags with my own food, and another thirty with personal items such as glove liners, heat packs, batteries, neck gaiters, and socks.

First, in a general sense, God wants pastors and leaders to be successful because he loves his kingdom and his bride, the church, but in God’s estimation, long-term faithfulness that produces fruit in ministry is rooted in humble, godly character. A second thing that this leader-quality list presses in on us is that ultimately God is the achiever; our calling is to be usable tools in his powerful hands. Because we are not sovereign over the situation in which we minister, because we have no power to change people’s hearts, because we are often in the way of instead of being part of what God is doing, and because we cannot predict the future, we have no ability on our own to achieve ministry growth or success. We are called to faithfulness of character—character, by the way, that only God can produce in us, and God is sovereign over the miracle of redeeming grace and the expansion of his kingdom.

The most usable money will be easily identifiable, because this reduces the work required for the seller to verify that she is receiving the amount of value for her merchandise that she thinks she is.

It’s not what we call ourselves that matters, it’s the attitude we bring and the skills we can contribute.