Validation Test Quotes

Dignity will only happen when you realize that having someone in your life doesn’t validate your worth.

The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.

Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to his moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.

There isn't any one big test or way to validate ourselves in the world. There's just a long, quiet process of finding our place in it

The rule that science is the only way to know something is itself unscientific; it cannot be tested. So the claim that only science can demonstrate truth actually flunks its own test, since it cannot validate itself!

When someone asks a question, don't assume they don't know the answer. Clever people will always test you.

Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity.

Religious beliefs and practices are certainly not the only factors determining the behaviour of a given society. But, no less certainly, they are among the determining factors. At least to some extent, the collective conduct of a nation is a test of the religion prevailing within it, a criterion by which we may legitimately judge the doctrinal validity of that religion and its practical efficiency in helping individuals to advance towards the goal of human existence.

No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.

It's been a harsh fight. You've been pummeled and knocked down. Your body aches, flesh torn and bruised. Your eyes can hardly see through a stream of blood. But you are cognizant and alive; therefore, you rise from the fight. This is life. It will test your will, your strength, and endurance. It will challenge your faith and convictions. It will scar your hopes and try your beliefs. In the end, life validates those who refuse to stay down.

Rule No. 6: Design Experiments and Test to Validate Your Hypotheses

Beautiful, fragile, fleeting, the sunrise shell; but not, for all that, illusory. Because it is not lasting, let us not fall into the cynic's trap and call it an illusion. Duration is not a test of true or false. The day of the dragon-fly or the night of the Saturnid moth is not invalid simply because that phase in its life cycle is brief. Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. "And what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place." The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.

Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before – whether or not it is actually true. In one study, subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in previous weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as true, even if they swore they had never heard it before. This is the case even when the experimenter tells the subjects that the sentences they are about to hear are false: despite this, mere exposure to an idea is enough to boost its believability upon later contact. The illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.

The publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858, and still more that of the 'Origin' in 1859, had the effect upon them of the flash of light, which to a man who has lost himself in a dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way. That which we were looking for, and could not find, was a hypothesis respecting the origin of known organic forms, which assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved to be actually at work. We wanted, not to pin our faith to that or any other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions which could be brought face to face with facts and have their validity tested. The 'Origin' provided us with the working hypothesis we sought.

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence. But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence. And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence. Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe? Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?

At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson’s law that "The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work seemed dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had coined the law that he began to have some doubts about the humor or benefits of it. If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method! If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge

It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children’s need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child’s desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn’t a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of

But it was a significant exercise, for it meant that I considered myself worthy, as I had never done before. That change in my consciousness was so bewildering that I looked back on my previous life with a sort of amazed pity. That narrowness, those scruples, that prolonged childhood... I even, and this is a great test, began to consider journeys I might make, for my own pleasure, without him. I had never been to Greece and I thought I might go now, some time soon. And I knew that if I went I should enjoy it, as I had never enjoyed a journey before. Because I should have James to come back to. By the very fact of his existence, he had given the validity to my entire future.

For what it's worth, I accept the basic idea that parents instinctively do 'love' their offspring no matter what -- the evolutionary reasoning behind this premise is too obvious to ignore. But actually 'liking' them, or enjoying them as people, seems like a totally different thing. It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children's need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child's desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn't a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of.

Well done. Here come the test results: You are a horrible person...I'm serious, that's what it says: "A horrible person." We weren't even testing for that. Don't let that horrible-person thing discourage you. It's just a data point...If it makes you feel any better, science has now validated your birth mother's decision to abandon you on a doorstep.

The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter’s ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established—and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks.

The psychological definition of an invalidating environment is an environment where the responses of the child are pervasively treated as inaccurate, unrealistic, trivial, or pathological, independent of the actual validity of the behavior. This is really a mess of words, but here are some examples of invalidating responses: The child says he doesn’t like green beans. “Of course you like green beans. Everybody likes green beans.” The child brings home a grade of 98 on a test. “Why didn’t you get a 100? I know you could have gotten a 100.” The child says she is hungry. “You are not hungry. You just ate.” The child comes home crying after a fight with a friend. “You didn’t need him as a friend anyway.” The teenager comes home after a terrible day at high school. “Don’t you complain. These are the best days of your life.” (Honestly, would you want to do high school again?)

That concept is important enough that I’m going to say it again: People rarely test ideas for external validity when they don’t have internal coherence. If it doesn’t make sense from within the bubble, you’re going to think it’s a mistake, or a lie, or somebody got it wrong. You will tend to do whatever is necessary to protect the consistency and coherence of that bubble, because to you, that bubble is reality itself. Liminal thinking requires a willingness to test and validate new ideas, even when they seem absurd, crazy, or wrong.

To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

Remember, the goal of customer discovery is to refine a business model enough to test it on a larger scale in the next step, customer validation. So

To step outside patriarchal thought means: Being skeptical toward every known system of thought; being critical of all assumptions, ordering values and definitions. Testing one’s statement by trusting our own, the female experience. Since such experience has usually been trivialized or ignored, it means overcoming the deep-seated resistance within ourselves toward accepting ourselves and our knowledge as valid. It means getting rid of the great men in our heads and substituting for them ourselves, our sisters, our anonymous foremothers.

As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.

We go through the futile process of asking for opinions and fish for compliments because we crave approval. We want to believe that the support and sign-off of someone we respect means our venture will succeed. But really, that person’s opinion doesn’t matter. They have no idea if the business is going to work. Only the market knows. You’re searching for the truth, not trying to be right. And you want to do it as quickly and cheaply as possible. Learning that your beliefs are wrong is frustrating, but it’s progress. It’s bringing you ever closer to the truth of a real problem and a good market. The worst thing you can do is ignore the bad news while searching for some tiny grain of validation to celebrate. You want the truth, not a gold star.

And as soon as you accepted that the man’s breakdown was a consequence of his war experience rather than his own innate weakness, then inevitably the war became the issue. And the therapy was a test, not only of the genuineness of the individual’s symptoms, but also of the validity of the demands the war was making on him. Rivers had survived partly by suppressing his awareness of this. But then along came Sassoon and made the justifiability of the war a matter for constant, open debate, and that suppression was no longer possible. At times it seemed to Rivers that all his other patients were the anvil and that Sassoon was the hammer. Inevitably there were times when he resented this. As a civilian, Rivers’s life had consisted of asking questions, and devising methods by which truthful answers could be obtained, but there are limits to how many fundamental questions you want to ask in a working day that starts before eight am and doesn’t end till midnight.

Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.

Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment. We must, incidentally, make it clear from the beginning that if a thing is not a science, it is not necessarily bad. For example, love is not a science. So, if something is said not to be a science, it does not mean that there is something wrong with it; it just means that it is not a science.

I state in my book Put Your Dream to the Test that the more valid reasons a person has to achieve their dream, the higher the odds are that they will. Valid reasons also increase the odds that a person will follow through with personal growth.

You “burn” your way into the mind by narrowing the focus to a single word or concept. It’s the ultimate marketing sacrifice. Federal Express was able to put the word overnight into the minds of its prospects because it sacrificed its product line and focused on overnight package delivery only. In a way, the law of leadership—it’s better to be first than to be better—enables the first brand or company to own a word in the mind of the prospect. But the word the leader owns is so simple that it’s invisible. The leader owns the word that stands for the category. For example, IBM owns computer. This is another way of saying that the brand becomes a generic name for the category. “We need an IBM machine.” Is there any doubt that a computer is being requested? You can also test the validity of a leadership claim by a word association test. If the given words are computer, copier, chocolate bar, and cola, the four most associated words are IBM, Xerox, Hershey’s, and Coke. An astute leader will go one step further to solidify its position. Heinz owns the word ketchup. But Heinz went on to isolate the most important ketchup attribute. “Slowest ketchup in the West” is how the company

For some reason there is a tendency to assume that one wild animal is a suitable model for another related species, whereas similar evidence would not be acceptable in human or veterinary medicine. For example, Shulaw etal. (1986) developed a serologic test to detect antibodies to Mycobacterium aviumssp. paratuberculosisin white-tailed deer, but determined the validity of the test “in deer” by using samples from infected sika and fallow deer. It is doubtful that a test developed to detect disease in humans would be accepted for use in public health circles, if its validity had been established by using squirrel monkeys and baboons!

The reality is that testing an unfinished product for Engineering and testing a customer’s willingness to buy an unfinished product are separate, unrelated functions. Customer Validation is not about having customers pay for products that are engineering tests. It’s about validating the entire market and business model.

THE RIGHT AND WRONG PICTURE OF A DREAM I’ve studied successful people for almost forty years. I’ve known hundreds of high-profile people who achieved big dreams. And I’ve achieved a few dreams of my own. What I’ve discovered is that a lot of people have misconceptions about dreams. Take a look at many of the things that people pursue and call dreams in their lives: Daydreams—Distractions from Current Work Pie-in-the-Sky Dreams—Wild Ideas with No Strategy or Basis in Reality Bad Dreams—Worries that Breed Fear and Paralysis Idealistic Dreams—The Way the World Would Be If You Were in Charge Vicarious Dreams—Dreams Lived Through Others Romantic Dreams—Belief that Some Person Will Make You Happy Career Dreams—Belief that Career Success Will Make You Happy Destination Dreams—Belief that a Position, Title, or Award Will Make You Happy Material Dreams—Belief that Wealth or Possessions Will Make You Happy If these aren’t good dreams—valid ones worthy of a person’s life—then what are? Here is my definition of a dream that can be put to the test and pass: a dream is an inspiring picture of the future that energizes your mind, will, and emotions, empowering you to do everything you can to achieve it.

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty. In fact, as I will argue later, I believe “entrepreneur” should be considered a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth. 3. Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. 5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

By teaching students of color that the best way to succeed is to respond to tests the way the state demands, determine the validity of an argument under the state’s rules, and examine essays only if they follow the state’s standards, we are creating education via deculturation, or stripping a culture, instead of transculturation, the merging of cultures. We didn’t land on education reform. Education reform landed on us.

Rin was startled at how good “good” made her feel. She found that she was fueled by praise from her masters. Praise meant that she had finally, finally received validation that she was not nothing. She could be brilliant, could be worth someone’s attention. She adored praise—craved it, needed it, and realized she found relief only when she finally had it. She realized, too, that she felt about praise the way that addicts felt about opium. Each time she received a fresh infusion of flattery, she could think only about how to get more of it. Achievement was a high. Failure was worse than withdrawal. Good test scores brought only momentary relief and temporary pride—she basked in her grace period of several hours before she began to panic about her next test. She craved praise so deeply that she felt it in her bones. And just like an addict, she did whatever she could to get it.

They don’t understand. Gratitude isn’t about them. It’s about the person giving it. Girls don’t say you look good because you actually look good. They process their feelings by communication. What they are actually saying is that they feel good being around you. What they are actually doing is checking your frame. When a guy dismisses or otherwise argues the compliment he is telling her that those emotions aren’t valid. He’s failed the test.

Translation is often seen as something that anyone who is fluent in two languages can do; one simply reads a text in the source language and somehow comes up with an equivalent text in the target language. Common misconceptions of translation such as this can go as far as to treat it as an art form, a view that chooses to ignore the fact that art also requires extensive training and deep knowledge of methods and techniques. It only takes a few minutes of trying to translate a text to make one realize that such views could not be further from the truth. Translation, as we will see in this book, is a complex process that follows a scientific method, whereby we analyze the source text to determine its communicative functions; to identify functional equivalence problems; to apply translation strategies to generate target language candidates, or hypotheses; and to finally test them to assess their validity.

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.

Those who struggle with the diagnosis may seek the opinion of doctor after doctor in the hope of finding a different explanation — and validation of their suffering. Repeatedly normal test results begin to seem a disappointment, so desperate is the patient’s search for another answer. Some find themselves pushed into a corner where they accept the role of the undiagnosed, someone who cannot be helped, because anything is better than the humiliation of a psychological disorder. Society is judgmental about psychological illness and patients know that.

But I try to make sure they understand that writing, and even getting good at it, and having books and stories and articles published, will not open the doors that most of them hope for. It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has finally validated their parking tickets, that they have in fact finally arrived. My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

In any case, psychological type has built a private world around itself, an intimate universe that has no need for external validation . . . For those within its charmed circle, type provides an unwavering self-conception, a foundation for relating to others, a plan for success, and an excuse for failure. It offers an explanation for why some people refuse to join in . . . Still at the center of this world is the haloed figure of Myers herself, whom her many followers affectionately call "Isabel." It sometimes seems that her fierce ardor for the test she created has been passed on to these followers like a torch. They, like her, appear to value type more than the people type is supposed to describe.

It has always been asked in the spirit of: ‘What are the best sources of our knowledge – the most reliable ones, those which will not lead us into error, and those to which we can and must turn, in case of doubt, as the last court of appeal?’ I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist – no more than ideal rulers – and that all ‘sources’ are liable to lead us into errors at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ The question of the sources of our knowledge, like so many authoritarian questions, is a genetic one. It asks for the origin of our knowledge, in the belief that knowledge may legitimize itself by its pedigree. The nobility of the racially pure knowledge, the untainted knowledge, the knowledge which derives from the highest authority, if possible from God: these are the (often unconscious) metaphysical ideas behind the question. My modified question, ‘How can we hope to detect error?’ may be said to derive from the view that such pure, untainted and certain sources do not exist, and that questions of origin or of purity should not be confounded with questions of validity, or of truth. …. The proper answer to my question ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ is I believe, ‘By criticizing the theories or guesses of others and – if we can train ourselves to do so – by criticizing our own theories or guesses.’ …. So my answer to the questions ‘How do you know? What is the source or the basis of your assertion? What observations have led you to it?’ would be: ‘I do not know: my assertion was merely a guess. Never mind the source, or the sources, from which it may spring – there are many possible sources, and I may not be aware of half of them; and origins or pedigrees have in any case little bearing upon truth. But if you are interested in the problem which I tried to solve by my tentative assertion, you may help me by criticizing it as severely as you can; and if you can design some experimental test which you think might refute my assertion, I shall gladly, and to the best of my powers, help you to refute it.

The ecosystem in which academic scientists work has created conditions that actually set them up for failure. There’s a constant scramble for research dollars. Promotions and tenure depend on their making splashy discoveries. There are big rewards for being first, even if the work ultimately fails the test of time. And there are few penalties for getting it wrong. In fact, given the scale of this problem, it’s evident that many scientists don’t even realize that they are making mistakes. Frequently scientists assume what they read in the literature is true and start research projects based on that assumption. Begley said one of the studies he couldn’t reproduce has been cited more than 2,000 times by other researchers, who have been building on or at least referring to it, without actually validating the underlying result.

That words are not things. (Identification of words with things, however, is widespread, and leads to untold misunderstanding and confusion.) That words mean nothing in themselves; they are as much symbols as x or y. That meaning in words arises from context of situation. That abstract words and terms are especially liable to spurious identification. The higher the abstraction, the greater the danger. That things have meaning to us only as they have been experienced before. “Thingumbob again.” That no two events are exactly similar. That finding relations and orders between things gives more dependable meanings than trying to deal in absolute substances and properties. Few absolute properties have been authenticated in the world outside. That mathematics is a useful language to improve knowledge and communication. That the human brain is a remarkable instrument and probably a satisfactory agent for clear communication. That to improve communication new words are not needed, but a better use of the words we have. (Structural improvements in ordinary language, however, should be made.) That the scientific method and especially the operational approach are applicable to the study and improvement of communication. (No other approach has presented credentials meriting consideration.) That the formulation of concepts upon which sane men can agree, on a given date, is a prime goal of communication. (This method is already widespread in the physical sciences and is badly needed in social affairs.) That academic philosophy and formal logic have hampered rather than advanced knowledge, and should be abandoned. That simile, metaphor, poetry, are legitimate and useful methods of communication, provided speaker and hearer are conscious that they are being employed. That the test of valid meaning is: first, survival of the individual and the species; second, enjoyment of living during the period of survival.

The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the reestablishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response. And in today’s world, that means recognizing that it’s impossible to have a well-informed citizenry without having a well-connected citizenry. While education remains important, it is now connection that is the key. A well-connected citizenry is made up of men and women who discuss and debate ideas and issues among themselves and who constantly test the validity of the information and impressions they receive from one another—as well as the ones they receive from their government. No citizenry can be well informed without a constant flow of honest information about contemporary events and without a full opportunity to participate in a discussion of the choices that the society must make. Moreover, if citizens feel deprived of a meaningful opportunity to participate in the national conversation, they can scarcely be blamed for developing a lack of interest in the process. And sure enough, numerous surveys and studies have documented the erosion of public knowledge of basic facts about our democracy. For example, from the data compiled by the National Election Studies on one recent election, only 15 percent of respondents could recall the name of even one of the candidates in the election in their district. Less than 4 percent could name two candidates. When there are so few competitive races, it’s hard to blame them. Two professors, James Snyder and David Stromberg, found that knowledge of candidates increased in media markets where the local newspaper covered the congressional representative more. Very few respondents claimed to learn anything at all about their congressional elections from television news.

For instance, there was the case of Nancy Schmeing, who had recently earned her doctorate in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Incredibly, Schmeing failed the reading comprehension section of the new [Massachusetts] teacher test, which required one to quickly read short essays and then choose the one "best" answer among those provided by the test maker. The exam supposedly assessed one's ability to boil down the essential meanings of prose. Schmeing's failing the reading section created a small furor about the test's credibility. After graduating from MIT, Schmeing worked as a technical consultant, translating engineering, science, and business documents for clients around the world. Thus, the very nature of her work necessitated the ability to find essential meanings in written texts, to comprehend a writer's purpose, and so forth. Moreover, Schmeing was a Fulbright scholar, had graduated magnum cum laude from college ... Schmeing's failure simply defied common sense, fueling concerns over the exam's predictive validity.

He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive? Academic pressures to publish, do those mean anything? Not much, we agree. How about the reforming impulse, a passion for social justice? Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? Who appoints them as mouthpieces? If they appoint themselves, as they clearly do, how valid is the commission? If Time alone makes masterpieces, as Anatole France thought, then great writing is just trial and error tested by time, and if it’s that, then above all it has to be free, it has to flow from the gift, not from outside pressures. The gift is its own justification, and there is no way of telling for sure, short of the appeal to posterity, whether it’s really worth something or whether it’s only the ephemeral expression of a fad or tendency, the articulation of a stereotype.

In contemporary Western society, buying a magazine on astrology - at a newsstand, say - is easy; it is much harder to find one on astronomy. Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily column on astrology; there are hardly any that have even a weekly column on astronomy. There are ten times more astrologers in the United States than astronomers. At parties, when I meet people that do not know I’m a scientist, I am sometimes asked “Are you a Gemini?” (chances of success, one in twelve), or “What sign are you?” Much more rarely am I asked “Have you heard that gold is made in supernova explosions?” or “When do you think Congress will approve a Mars Rover?” (...) And personal astrology is with us still: consider two different newspaper astrology columns published in the same city on the same day. For example, we can examine The New York Post and the New York Daily News on September 21, 1979. Suppose you are a Libra - that is, born between September 23 and October 22. According to the astrologer for the Post, ‘a compromise will help ease tension’; useful, perhaps, but somewhat vague. According to the Daily News’ astrologer, you must ‘demand more of yourself’, an admonition that is also vague but also different. These ‘predictions’ are not predictions; rather they are pieces of advice - they tell you what to do, not what will happen. Deliberately, they are phrased so generally that they could apply to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistencies. Why are they published as unapologetically as sport statistics and stock market reports? Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many cases in which one twin is killed in childhood, in a riding accident, say, or is struck by lightning, while the other lives to a prosperous old age. Each was born in precisely the same place and within minutes of the other. Exactly the same planets were rising at their births. If astrology were valid, how could two such twins have such profoundly different fates? It also turns out that astrologers cannot even agree among themselves on what a given horoscope means. In careful tests, they are unable to predict the character and future of people they knew nothing about except their time and place of birth.

way to respond to such a test is to give an ambiguous answer and then change the topic. For example, you could respond by saying - “It’s hard to know what people mean to say when you cannot see their body language, mannerisms, etc.” Never qualify yourself in your emails. If she mentions in an email that she loves the car that you are standing next to in one of your photographs, get her talking about why she loves it. Ask her about her interest in automobiles. You could even ask her if she has a need for speed. Do not begin talking about how you bought that car last year and it cost you a pretty penny. Do not talk about how it goes from zero to 60 miles per hour in under five seconds or how people always ask you to give them a joyride in it. Do not bite on her bait. A woman will do this to see if a man might slip up and show her exactly how desperate he is to get validation from other people, especially women. Sample questions Which of the following animals do you like? a. Komodo dragon (+5) b. Bonobo (+3) c. Dog (0) d. Cat  (-1) Your friends would describe you as: a. Sweet and supportive (+5) b. Feisty, fun and sassy (+3) c. Strong and independent (0) d. Totally random (-1)

The part played by deduction in science is greater than Bacon supposed. Often, when a hypothesis has to be tested, there is a long deductive journey from the hypothesis to some consequence that can be tested by observation. Usually the deduction is mathematical, and in this respect Bacon underestimated the importance of mathematics in scientific investigation. The problem of induction by simple enumeration remains unsolved to this day. Bacon was quite right in rejecting simple enumeration where the details of scientific investigation are concerned, for in dealing with details we may assume general laws on the basis of which, so long as they are taken as valid, more or less cogent methods can be built up. John Stuart Mill framed four canons of inductive method, which can be usefully employed so long as the law of causality is assumed; but this law itself, he had to confess, is to be accepted solely on the basis of induction by simple enumeration. The thing that is achieved by the theoretical organization of science is the collection of all subordinate inductions into a few that are very comprehensive—perhaps only one. Such comprehensive inductions are confirmed by so many instances that it is thought legitimate to accept, as regards them, an induction by simple enumeration. This situation is profoundly unsatisfactory, but neither Bacon nor any of his successors have found a way out of it.

Postscript, 2005 From the Publisher ON APRIL 7, 2004, the Mid-Hudson Highland Post carried an article about an appearance that John Gatto made at Highland High School. Headlined “Rendered Speechless,” the report was subtitled “Advocate for education reform brings controversy to Highland.” The article relates the events of March 25 evening of that year when the second half of John Gatto’s presentation was canceled by the School Superintendent, “following complaints from the Highland Teachers Association that the presentation was too controversial.” On the surface, the cancellation was in response to a video presentation that showed some violence. But retired student counselor Paul Jankiewicz begged to differ, pointing out that none of the dozens of students he talked to afterwards were inspired to violence. In his opinion, few people opposing Gatto had seen the video presentation. Rather, “They were taking the lead from the teacher’s union who were upset at the whole tone of the presentation.” He continued, “Mr. Gatto basically told them that they were not serving kids well and that students needed to be told the truth, be given real-life learning experiences, and be responsible for their own education. [Gatto] questioned the validity and relevance of standardized tests, the prison atmosphere of school, and the lack of relevant experience given students.” He added that Gatto also had an important message for parents: “That you have to take control of your children’s education.” Highland High School senior Chris Hart commended the school board for bringing Gatto to speak, and wished that more students had heard his message. Senior Katie Hanley liked the lecture for its “new perspective,” adding that ”it was important because it started a new exchange and got students to think for themselves.” High School junior Qing Guo found Gatto “inspiring.” Highland teacher Aliza Driller-Colangelo was also inspired by Gatto, and commended the “risk-takers,” saying that, following the talk, her class had an exciting exchange about ideas. Concluded Jankiewicz, the students “were eager to discuss the issues raised. Unfortunately, our school did not allow that dialogue to happen, except for a few teachers who had the courage to engage the students.” What was not reported in the newspaper is the fact that the school authorities called the police to intervene and ‘restore the peace’ which, ironically enough, was never in the slightest jeopardy as the student audience was well-behaved and attentive throughout. A scheduled evening meeting at the school between Gatto and the Parents Association was peremptorily forbidden by school district authorities in a final assault on the principles of free speech and free assembly… There could be no better way of demonstrating the lasting importance of John Taylor Gatto’s work, and of this small book, than this sorry tale. It is a measure of the power of Gatto’s ideas, their urgency, and their continuing relevance that school authorities are still trying to shut them out 12 years after their initial publication, afraid even to debate them. — May the crusade continue! Chris Plant Gabriola Island, B.C. February, 2005

Until knowledge becomes part of you, it is not possible to talk about awareness, or true understanding. Everything must come from and into an organism. Theories are only valid when made organic — ”organic” as in "part of the body". The knowledge that has to be learned and followed like a discipline is useless. It doesn't matter which amount of knowledge you absorb or in which variety. Knowledge can’t be remembered all the time in the same proportion that is kept, not all of it, and not all of it at the same time. As a matter of fact, when knowledge is not assimilated above personal interests, that same knowledge is already corrupted. When knowledge is seen as a means to a goal, either it is in obtaining something from the outside world, or passing some test, this knowledge has not become organic but merely used as a tool. That's why so many people avoid being confronted with their ignorance and react angrily when faced with their contradictions, which is quite obvious when we compare what they learn and what they say. You see this everywhere, in teachers, politicians, religious groups, and so on. And then you wonder why are people not honest. But they can’t understand honesty as much as they can’t understand their own ignorance. The stupid are not aware they are stupid, and that’s what really makes them stupid. When someone is too stupid, ignorance is replaced by arrogance. And then this person feels like the world is a bit threat to survival at an individual level. We call this attitude being egotistic. But you can’t stop being an egotistic when suppressing your emotions, or imagining that everyone is a source of negative energy but you. As a matter of fact, you commonly see the egotistic drop into apathy precisely because they confuse the work they must do on themselves with the anger they feel for the world as a whole. Have you ever noticed how easily people turn to anger when you ask them a question? That’s a reaction of someone moving from apathy to fear. On the surface this person is acting like a rude individual, but the emotions behind this behavior are those one feels when watching a horror movie. They are afraid of their own feelings, and project this fear as an aggression. Now comes the interesting part: Who are they attacking? They are attacking precisely the one that can help them, because only such individual will ask the right questions. An individual on apathy and lack of interest, can’t ask anything that is interesting or motivating. So we come to an interesting paradox in society, that those who can uplift others, end up being perceived as a threat to them. And that’s the simplest way to explain insanity.

Sinclair James - English Communication Language in Asia Is English Language a Hindrance to Communication for Foreigners in Asia? One of the hesitations of westerners in coming to Asia is the language barrier. True, Asia has been a melting pot of different aspects of life that in every country, there is a distinct characteristic and a culture which would seem odd to someone who grew up in an entirely different perspective. Language is one of the most flourishing uniqueness of Asian nations. Although their boundaries are emphasized by mere walls which can be broken down easily, the brand of each individual can still be determined on the language they use or most comfortable with. Communication may be a problem as it is an issue which neighboring countries also encounter on each other. Message relays or even simple gestures, if interpreted wrongly can cause conflicts. Indeed, the complaints are valid. However, on the present day number of American and European visitors and the boost in tourism economies, language barriers seem to have been surpassed. Perhaps, the problem may not even exist at all. According to English Language Proficiency Test (ELPT) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS), Asian countries are not altogether illiterate in speaking and understanding the universal language. If so, there are countries which can even speak English as fluent as any native can. Take for example the Philippines. Once in Manila, the country’s capital, you will find thousands of individuals representing different nationalities. The center for business growth in the country, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has proven the literacy of the people in conversing using the international language. Clients from abroad prefer Filipinos in dealing with customers concern since they can easily comprehend grasp and explain things in English. ELPT and IELTS did not even include the Philippines in the list of the top English speaking nations in Asia since they are already considered one of the best and most fluent in this field. Other neighboring Asian countries also send their citizens to the Philippines to learn English. With a mixture of British and American English being used in everyday conversations, the Philippines has to be considered to be included in the top 5 most native English speakers. You may even be surprised to meet a young child in Manila who has not gone to school or mingled with foreigners but can speak and understand English. Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and most Asian countries, if indeed all, can also easily understand and speak English. It seems that the concern for miscommunication has completely no basis and remains a groundless issue. Maybe perhaps, those who say this just want to find a dumb excuse? Read more at: SjTravels.com

Although some scientists questioned the validity of these studies, others went along willingly. People from a wide range of disciplines were recruited, including psychics, physicists, and computer scientists, to investigate a variety of unorthodox projects: experimenting with mind-altering drugs such as LSD, asking psychics to locate the position of Soviet submarines patrolling the deep oceans, etc. In one sad incident, a U.S. Army scientist was secretly given LSD. According to some reports, he became so violently disoriented that he committed suicide by jumping out a window. Most of these experiments were justified on the grounds that the Soviets were already ahead of us in terms of mind control. The U.S. Senate was briefed in another secret report that the Soviets were experimenting with beaming microwave radiation directly into the brains of test subjects. Rather than denouncing the act, the United States saw “great potential for development into a system for disorienting or disrupting the behavior pattern of military or diplomatic personnel.” The U.S. Army even claimed that it might be able to beam entire words and speeches into the minds of the enemy: “One decoy and deception concept … is to remotely create noise in the heads of personnel by exposing them to low power, pulsed microwaves.… By proper choice of pulse characteristics, intelligible speech may be created.… Thus, it may be possible to ‘talk’ to selected adversaries in a fashion that would be most disturbing to them,” the report said. Unfortunately, none of these experiments was peer-reviewed, so millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on projects like this one, which most likely violated the laws of physics, since the human brain cannot receive microwave radiation and, more important, does not have the ability to decode microwave messages. Dr. Steve Rose, a biologist at the Open University, has called this far-fetched scheme a “neuro-scientific impossibility.” But for all the millions of dollars spent on these “black projects,” apparently not a single piece of reliable science emerged. The use of mind-altering drugs did, in fact, create disorientation and even panic among the subjects who were tested, but the Pentagon failed to accomplish the key goal: control of the conscious mind of another person. Also, according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, brainwashing by the communists had little long-term effect. Most of the American troops who denounced the United States during the Korean War reverted back to their normal personalities soon after being released. In addition, studies done on people who have been brainwashed by certain cults also show that they revert back to their normal personality after leaving the cult. So it seems that, in the long run, one’s basic personality is not affected by brainwashing.

Daoist Ordination – Receiving a valid “Lu” 收录 Register Since returning to the US, and living in Los Angeles, many (ie, truly many) people have come to visit my office and library, asking about Daoist "Lu" 录registers, and whether or not they can be purchased from self declared “Daoist Masters” in the United States. The Daoist Lu register and ordination ritual can only be transmitted in Chinese, after 10+ years of study with a master, learning how to chant Zhengyi or Quanzhen music and liturgy, including the Daoist drum, flute, stringed instruments, and mudra, mantra, and visualization of spirits, where they are stored in the body, how they are summoned forth, for which one must be able to use Tang dynasty pronunciation of classical Chinese texts, ie “Tang wen” 唐文, to be effective and truly transmitted. Daoist meditation and ritual 金录醮，黄录斋 must all be a part of one's daily practice before going to Mt Longhu Shan and passing the test, which qualifies a person for one of the 9 grades of ordination (九品) the lowest of which is 9, highest is 1; grades 6 and above are never taught at Longhu Shan, only recognized in a "test", and awarded an appropriate grade ie rank, or title. Orthodox Longhu Shan Daoists may only pass on this knowledge to one offspring, and one chosen disciple, once in a lifetime, after which they must "pass on" (die) or be "wafted to heaven." Longmen Quanzhen Daoists, on the other hand, allow their knowledge to be transmitted and practiced, in classical Chinese, after living in a monastery and daily practice as a monk or nun. “Dao for $$$” low ranking Daoists at Longhu Shan accept money from foreign (mostly USA) commercial groups, and award illegitimate "licenses" for a large fee. Many (ie truly many) who have suffered from the huge price, and wrongful giving of "documents" have asked me this question, and shown me the documents they received. In all such cases, it is best to observe the warning of Confucius, "respect demonic spirits but keep a distance" 敬鬼神而遠之. One can study from holy nuns at Qingcheng shan, and Wudangshan, but it is best to keep safely away from “for profit” people who ask fees for going to Longhu Shan and receiving poorly translated English documents. It is a rule of Daoism, Laozi Ch 67, to respect all, with compassion, and never put oneself above others. The reason why so many Daoist and Buddhist masters do not come to the US is because of this commercial ie “for profit” instead of spiritual use, made from Daoist practices which must never be sold, or money taken for teaching / practicing, in which case true spiritual systems become ineffective. The ordination manual itself states the strict rule that the highly secret talisman, drawn with the tongue on the hard palate of the true Daoist, must never be drawn out in visible writing, or shown to anyone. Many of the phony Longhu Shan documents shown to me break this rule, and are therefore ineffective as well as law breaking. Respectfully submitted, 敬上 3-28-2015

Kode’s older sister, Kira, was leaning over a display of jewelry, fisting a jade-green necklace in one hand. Her nose was two inches from the Braetic across the table, the two exchanging intimidating glares. Eena watched for a few seconds as Kira all but crawled over a pile of merchandise, her face scrunched up with resentment, yet enviably stunning as always. “Hey Kode,” the young queen whispered. “Hey, girl.” “What’s going on?” “Kira’s bartering.” Eena watched the fistful of necklace come within a whisker of smacking the merchant’s nose. “She isn’t going to hurt the guy, is she?” Kode snorted on a chuckle. “Not if the dude’s got any sense.” Validly concerned, Eena inched closer to the confrontation, straining to hear their growled dialogue. Kode and Niki crept closer too. Efren, however, stayed where he was, testing the flagpole’s ability to support his body weight. They watched the feisty Mishmorat hold up a small pouch and shake it in front of the Braetic’s eyes. Kira’s fingers curled like claws around the purse. She seemed to smirk for a second when the merchant flinched. In a blink he was back in her face again, shoving aside the purse. “What is she trying to trade?” Eena asked, her voice still hushed as though she might disturb the haggling taking place across the way. “Viidun coins,” Kode said. “Ef gave ‘em to her.” “Are they worth much?’ Kode grinned wryly, “He sure as hell don’t freakin’ think so.” Eena foresaw Niki’s disapproving smack to the back of Kode’s head before he even finished his sentence. He cursed at his girlfriend for the physical abuse, an unwise response that earned him an additional thump on the head. “Freakin’ tyrant,” Kode grumbled. “Vulgar grogfish,” Niki retorted. Still unable to hear well enough to satisfy her curiosity, Eena stole in closer to the scene of heated bartering. She stopped when Kira’s strong voice carried over the murmur of the crowd. Kode and his girlfriend were right on her heels. “This purse is worth ten of those gaudy necklaces. You oughta be payin’ me to take ‘em off your hands, Braetic!” “That alien money is worthless to me, Mishmorat. In all my life I’ve never left Moccobatran soil. And even if I were to take an interstellar trip someday, you’d never catch the likes of me on a barbarian planet like Rapador!” Kira jerked her head, causing her black, cascading hair to ripple over her shoulder. The action made the trader flinch again. His eyes tapered, appearing to fume over what he perceived as intentional bullying. “You ain’t gonna sell this crap to no one else,” the exotic Mishmorat said. “Be smart and take the money. Hell, you could make a dozen pieces of jewelry from these coins. Sell ’em all for ten times the worth of anything you got here.” The Braetic shoved his finger at Kira’s chest, breathing down her throat at the same time. “Why don’t you just take your pretty little backside away from my table and make your own Viidun jewelry. Sell it yourself and then come back with a reasonable offer for my necklace.” His palm opened flat, demanding she hand over the jade stones still in her fist. “You wanna make me?” Kira breathed. “What do you plan to do, steal it?” The merchant challenged her in a gesture, nostrils flaring. “I’m no thief, but I’m not above beating some sense into you ‘til you choose to barter like a respectable Braetic!” Caught up in the intense interaction, Kode supported his sister a little too loudly. “Teach the freakin’ crook a lesson, Sis!” Niki smacked her boyfriend upside the head without missing a beat.

A brick could be used to determine whether you are really in love or not. But you’re never going to be able to tell for sure if you try to run the experiment with the brick upside down. Keep flipping the brick over until the desired outcome is reached, and then you’ll know for certain the test is valid.


Therefore, alpha and beta testing are Product Development functions that belong to engineering. They are about validating the product technically, not the market.

The industrial revolution needed people who could predictably produce results in a standardized way, so the education system provided. Not so long ago, if you wanted to learn anything, you had to go find a building with good books and smart people willing to teach what was in those books. If you were allowed, you had better sit down and shut up and take it as it was in order to have a chance at a future. It was a great system at the time and it really brought us a lot, but the world has changed and now we’re stuck with a rigid and inflexible school system that produces more bricks for a wall that’s no longer being built. A giant amount of human potential is being wasted away in classrooms that are only helpful to those who happen to be the sit-down-take-notes kind of learners. Taking tests that test how good we are at taking tests. Preparing for life instead of living it. Sitting down for six to eight hours a day. Being judged on the ability to conform to a system. A disempowering system that teaches us to always strive for some future state or circumstance to validate our being.

By using the case formulation skills in this book, you are committed to scientific principles: keep data separate from speculation, test the validity of hypotheses with data, and treat interventions as experiments.

16. Hamilton DM, Haennel RG. Validity and reliability of the 6-minute walk test in a cardiac rehabilitation population; J of Cardiopulm Rehab. 2000; 20(3): 156-64.

As an ideal of intellectual inquiry and a strategy for the advancement of knowledge, the scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility of error. Most of us gravitate toward trying to verify our beliefs, to the extent that we bother investigating their validity at all. But scientists gravitate toward falsification; as a community if not as individuals, they seek to disprove their beliefs. Thus, the defining feature of a hypothesis is that it has the potential to be proven wrong (which is why it must be both testable and tested), and the defining feature of a theory is that it hasn’t been proven wrong yet. But the important part is that it can be—no matter how much evidence appears to confirm it, no matter how many experts endorse it, no matter how much popular support it enjoys. In fact, not only can any given theory be proven wrong; as we saw in the last chapter, sooner or later, it probably will be. And when it is, the occasion will mark the success of science, not its failure. This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries.

The Intellectual Vacuum of Current Moral Thought Toward the beginning of this chapter we made the statement that the centuries-long attempt to devise a morality from within merely human resources has now proven itself a failure. Now we want to return to this point in the light of Jesus’ exposition of the rightness of the kingdom heart. What is the basis of such a statement? Simply this: that, as noted in the opening of chapter 1, there is in fact no body of moral knowledge now operative in the institutions of knowledge in our culture. This is the outcome of the now centuries-long effort to develop a moral guide to life within the framework of human thought and experience alone, unassisted by revelation. By contrast, the Christian teaching about moral goodness that derives from the principles laid down by Jesus does have a historical, theoretical, and practical claim to constitute the true body of moral knowledge. This is not said to encourage blind acceptance but precisely the opposite. It is said to encourage the toughest of testing for those teachings in all areas of thought and real life. We saw in chapter 1 the young lady who went to Professor Coles on her way out of Harvard and said to him, “I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good?” Then she added, “What’s the point of knowing good, if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?” But, as we pointed out, knowing good is not seriously proposed in college or university courses today. Any “knowing” in such matters is thought to be totally impossible. In fact, both knowing good and being good are for the most part treated with open scorn in the academic settings which determine so much of our lives. That is the outcome of the long effort to establish a secular ethic in the modern period. But the concern for becoming good and being good remains, as the words of both President Bok and Professor Coles show, for it is a real-life issue that will never go away. And it is with regard to this issue of what kind of people we are to be that the teachings of Jesus about the rightness of the kingdom heart show him to be the unrivaled master of human life. Any serious inquirer can validate those teachings in his or her own experience. But they cannot invalidate them by simply refusing to consider them and hiding behind the dogmas of modern intellect.

Applying that test here, we concluded that Congress can validly make obstruction-of-justice statutes applicable to corruptly motivated official acts of the President without impermissibly undermining his Article II functions.

Forensic DNA Expert Anil Gupta offer a variety of DNA forensic testing systems including STR, Y-STR, and mitochondrial DNA. The DNA Sample in Forensic Analysis can be collected from blood, saliva, perspiration, hair, teeth, mucus, finger nails, semon and these can be found almost anywhere at crime scence. Anil Gupta is here to help make sense of this complex scientific issue and to testify before the court on these issues when necessary. Initial Consultation is FREE – If you send us the report we will lend you our expertise to help you understand your situation. Written Reports and Affidavits Discovery Documents – free by request, all you need to obtain the entire laboratory case file Mike is a leading forensic DNA expert with considerable experience in forensic biology. He is a clear and balanced expert opinion highly qualified provider to help lawyers, attorneys and lawyers support their clients and the criminal justice system. He is a very experienced scientist, whose career has focused on developing the ability to DNA analysis, defining standards, interpreting results, explaining evidence and providing advice to help both the defense and Processing equipment. Mike has a great depth of technical knowledge. As the chief DNA scientist (head of discipline) with the former Forensic Science Service (FSS), he established technical standards for DNA analytical processes, staff competencies and training. He was head of the Specialist Unit at FSS DNA and led the creation of the first dedicated facility of ultra-clean low template DNA. He has led the validation and implementation of several important new DNA processes. Through audit and process review, it can provide an effective and risk-based quality assurance, as it has for many years to the FSS, to the National DNA Database and to the courts.

tests are constructed and normed on native English speakers and may not provide valid inferences about the achievement of English Language Learners. Psychometric

The failure of companies in a free market, then, is not a defect of the system, or an unfortunate by-product of competition; rather, it is an indispensable aspect of any evolutionary process. According to one economist, 10 percent of American companies go bankrupt every year.4 The economist Joseph Schumpeter called this “creative destruction.” Now, compare this with centrally planned economies, where there are almost no failures at all. Companies are protected from failure by subsidy. The state is protected from failure by the printing press, which can inflate its way out of trouble. At first, this may look like an enlightened way to go about solving the problems of economic production, distribution, and exchange. Nothing ever fails and, by implication, everything looks successful. But this is precisely why planned economies didn’t work. They were manned by intelligent planners who decided how much grain to produce, how much iron to mine, and who used complicated calculations to determine the optimal solutions. But they faced the same problem as the Unilever mathematicians: their ideas, however enlightened, were not tested rapidly enough—and so had little opportunity to be reformed in the light of failure. Even if the planners were ten times smarter than the businessmen operating in a market economy, they would still fall way behind. Without the benefit of a valid test, the system is plagued by rigidity. In markets, on the other hand, it is the thousands of little failures that lubricate and, in a sense, guide the system. When companies go under, other entrepreneurs learn from these mistakes, the system creates new ideas, and consumers ultimately benefit.

The historical record also shows that attitudes toward homosexuality have little to do with whether people believe it occurs in animals or not, and consequently, in its "naturalness". True, throughout much of recorded history, the charge of "unnaturalness" - including the claim that homosexuality did not occur in animals - was used to justify every imaginable form of sanction, control, and repression against homosexuality. But many other interpretations of "naturalness" were also prevalent at various times. Indeed, the very fact that homosexuality was thought to be "unnatural" - that is, not found in nature - was sometimes used to justify its *superiority* to heterosexuality. In ancient Greece, for example, same-sex love was thought to be purer than opposite-sex love because it did not involve procreation or "animal-like" passions. On the other hand, homosexuality was sometimes condemned precisely because it was considered *closer* to "nature", reflecting the base, uncontrolled sexual instincts of the animal world. The Nazis used this reasoning (in part) to target homosexuals and other "subhumans" for the concentration camps (where homosexual men subjected to medical experiments were referred to as test animals), while sexual relations between women were disparaginly characterized as "animal love" in late eighteenth-century New England . The irrationality of such beliefs is highlighted in cases where charges of "unnaturalness" were combined, paradoxically, with accusations of animalistic behavior. Some early Latin texts, for instance, simultaneously condemned homosexuals for exhibiting behavior unknown in animals while also denouncing them for imitating particular species (such as the hyena or hare) that were believed to indulge in homosexuality. In our own time, the fact that a given characteristic of a minority human population is biologically determined has little to do with whether that population should be - or is - discriminated against. Racial minorities, for example, can claim a biological basis for their difference, yet this has done little to eliminate racial prejudice. Religious groups, on the other hand, can claim no such biological prerogative, and yet this does not invalidate the entitlement of such groups to freedom from discrimination. It should be clear, then, that whether homosexuality is biologically determined or not - none of these things guarantee the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality or in itself renders homosexuality "valid" or "illegitimate".

1.10 Four Kinds of Predictive Validity for Intelligence Tests 1.10.3. Everyday Life The importance of general intelligence in everyday life often is not obvious but it is profound. As Professor Earl Hunt has pointed out, if you are a college-educated person, it is highly likely that most of your friends and acquaintances are as well. When is the last time you invited someone to your home for dinner that was not college-educated? Professor Hunt calls this cognitive segregation and it is powerful in fostering the erroneous belief that everyone has a similar capacity or potential for reasoning about daily problems and issues. Most people with high g cannot easily imagine what daily life is like for a person with low g. [...] Consider some statistics comparing low and high IQ groups (low = 75–90; high = 110–125) on relative risk of several life events. For example, the odds of being a high school dropout are 133 times more likely if you’re in the low group. People in the low group are 10 times more at risk for being a chronic welfare recipient. The risk is 7.5 times greater in the low group for incarceration, and 6.2 times more for living in poverty. Unemployment and even divorce are a bit more likely in the low group. IQ even predicts traffic accidents. In the high IQ group, the death rate from traffic accidents is about 51 per 10,000 drivers, but in the low IQ group, this almost triples to about 147. This may be telling us that people with lower IQ, on average, have a poorer ability to assess risk and may take more chances when driving or performing other activities (Gottfredson, 2002; 2003b).

1.11 Why Do Myths About Intelligence Definitions and Measurement Persist? Given all this strong empirical evidence that intelligence test scores are meaningful, why does the myth persist that scores have little if any validity? Here is an informative example. From time to time, a college admissions representative will assert that in their institution they find no relationship between grade point average (GPA) and SAT scores. Such observations are virtually always based on a lack of understanding of a basic statistical principle regarding the correlation between two variables. To calculate a correlation between any two variables, there must be a wide range of scores for each variable. At a place like MIT, for example, most students fall in a narrow range of high SAT scores. This is a classic problem of restriction of range. There is little variance among the students, so in this case, the relationship between GPA and SAT scores will not be very strong. Sampling from just the high end or just the low end or just the middle of a distribution restricts range and results in spuriously low or zero correlations. Restriction of range actually accounts for many findings about what intelligence test scores “fail” to predict.

Paradigms also generate predictions, and a crucial test of a paradigm’s validity and usefulness is the extent to which the predictions derived from it turn out to be more accurate than those from alternative paradigms. A statist paradigm, for instance, leads John Mearsheimer to predict that “the situation between Ukraine and Russia is ripe for the outbreak of security competition between them. Great powers that share a long and unprotected common border, like that between Russia and Ukraine, often lapse into competition driven by security fears. Russia and Ukraine might overcome this dynamic and learn to live together in harmony, but it would be unusual if they do.

Page 42: Whatever the combination of sources of test bias might be, genuine bias against a minority will show up in a way that leaves no room for doubt: It will under-predict the test taker’s performance in the classroom or on the job. Whether predictive validity is the same for different groups can be subjected to rigorous statistical scrutiny, and it has been, repeatedly. The results are unambiguous, whether the thing being predicted is grades in school or performance on the job. The major tests do not under-predict the performance of Africans or Latins.

Please notice three elements in that definition. First, a word of prophecy is a message of encouragement—not discouragement, not correction or rebuke, and not judgment. In 1 Corinthians 14:3, Paul provides the threefold role of prophecy: “But he who prophesies speaks edification and exhortation and comfort to men.” A great way to test the validity of a prophetic word is to ask, “Did that word of prophecy bring edification, exhortation, or comfort to the hearer?

Wargaming, by definition, traffics in martial subject matter. Perceived in its full historical and material diversity, however, it is not inherently militaristic. Such at least is our governing belief—readers should use what follows to arrive at their own determination. Wargaming is also possessed of deeper significance to game studies and game history than the merely topical; that is, its relevance or import cannot be evaluated simply by the extent to which one does or does not think themselves interested in games about war. Its professional practitioners will often define wargaming as a tool for abductive reasoning, a term first introduced by Charles Sanders Pierce for testing hypotheses. As contributor Rex Brynen has previously suggested, “Wargaming is much more policy- and planning-oriented than most other gaming. It also has much more rigorous traditions of design, validation, adjudication, instrumentation/reporting, and analysis.

feedback on quality, and bug fixing. These accelerate beneficial changes entering production, limit issues deployed, and enable rapid identification and remediation of issues introduced through deployment activities or discovered in your environments. Adopt approaches that provide fast feedback on quality and enable rapid recovery from changes that do not have desired outcomes. Using these practices mitigates the impact of issues introduced through the deployment of changes. Plan for unsuccessful changes so that you are able to respond faster if necessary and test and validate the changes you make. Be aware of planned activities in your environments so that you can manage the risk of changes impacting planned activities. Emphasize frequent, small, reversible changes to limit the scope of change. This results in easier troubleshooting and faster remediation with the option to roll back a change. It also means you are able to get the benefit of valuable changes more frequently. Evaluate the operational readiness of your workload, processes, procedures, and personnel

achieving strategic success requires relying on a logical argument, unless they want to depend on luck. By argument, we mean a chain of reasoning by which a conclusion is drawn from a set of assumptions or premises. By logical argument, we mean an argument that passes the test of logic. We define logic as reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity.7 As we illustrate later, validity in this usage means that the premises automatically imply the conclusion: the chain of reasoning makes sense and is logical.

MVP Testing. Prototyping and prototype testing should proceed in iterative loops until a dominant design emerges. Based on test feedback, designers should reject some prototypes and refine others, producing higher-fidelity versions. Once they converge on a single, favored solution, it’s time for minimum viable product testing. An MVP is a prototype—a facsimile of the future product. What distinguishes an MVP from other prototypes is how it is tested. Rather than sitting across a table, getting verbal feedback from a reviewer, you put a prototype that seems like a real product in the hands of real customers in a real-world context. The goal is to quickly but rigorously test assumptions about the demand for your solution—and gain what Eric Ries calls “validated learning”—with as little wasted effort as possible.

I found myself asking the big question in spy school that wasn't on any test: How does a scholar, a strategist, or a soldier understand a culture well enough to predict future outcomes without being willing to understand that all humans, from their own perspectives, are living a truth and reality as valid as ours?

ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating. Are you basing your position on extrinsic or intrinsic motivators? Why do you think this is going to be something you enjoy doing? What evidence do you have? Every time you consider a career move, keep thinking about the most important assumptions that have to prove true, and how you can swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid. Make sure you are being realistic about the path ahead of you.

Some people turn to religion or some other ideology or belief system to find answers to life’s mysteries. But for me, there is no substitute for the careful hypothesising, testing, and deducing of facts about the world that are the hallmark of the scientific method. The understanding we have gained through science—and physics in particular—of how the world is made up and how it works is, in my view, not just one of many equally valid ways of reaching the ‘truth’ about reality. It is the only reliable way we have.

Risk is the test of love’s validity.

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Well, where does that leave us with regard to social action and practice? The answer is very far away. There still remains an enormous gap between what we have to grasp in order to ground moral action, to choose a course of action on moral grounds. An enormous gap between that and what we, in fact, understand about human nature and the human needs that derive from it, and the human rights that derive from it. Big gap. So, we are left where we were, with the need to make an intuitive leap and to posit some judgment about what real, intrinsic human nature is. In a sense, you're staking your faith in what you think or hope human beings may be. Now, if you take as your faith that of, say, the classical liberal doctrine, you will conclude that there is no justification, there's no moral justification for the commissar, the central committee, or the cultural or corporate manager, or any of the others who control and coerce us on species grounds. The actual classical liberal view, which is very different from what is known with its deep innatist roots, is very subversive and radical because it challenges the existence of any form of authority and requires that it be justified, which can rarely be done. It's not too surprising, I think, that the actual ideas of the Enlightenment have been subjected to such a broad-ranging attack. They are radical and subversive because of the faith that they express in human capacity, and human rights, and human needs, and their richness. And that's a deeply upsetting view from the point of view of any institutional structure which is concerned with control and manipulation, or any of the people who operate within those institutional structures. Well, if one takes this position, the next thing to do is to make the intuitive leap and turn to the concrete substantive questions of acting as a moral agent, choosing a course of action. And here what you do is seek out structures of authority and domination. Often we don't see them, so you have to try to find them even though they're there. Once you notice them, you see them and seek them out. Ask the question as to whether they, in fact, are legitimate for some contingent reason, say, self-defense or whatever argument is put forth. And if they fail that test, as they almost invariably do, to move forward to dismantle them, which means solidarity, organization, and so on. That's a hard task. But there are achievements. There are real achievements. For most of human history, for example, literal human slavery was considered legitimate. In fact, considered quite praiseworthy. It was for the benefit of these depraved creatures who shouldn't be left on their own. It's only a little tiny period of human history where this is considered a total obscenity. And the fact that it is considered a total obscenity is an achievement. In the 18th century, it was pointed out that wage slavery is fundamentally not very different from slavery. If people are compelled to rent themselves in order to survive, it's not very different than selling yourself in order to survive. That's an insight that has yet to be recovered, but it's a valid one. And, in fact, notice that it grows from these same conceptions of human nature. But, at least, literal human slavery would no longer be justified by, I suppose, almost anyone. That's an achievement. It's a moral achievement. It's a moral advance. Just in our own lifetimes, the questions of the legitimacy of sexist oppression have come to the fore. It's not like anybody noticed before, but there's been a sustained and committed effort to bring them to consciousness. And it's not long ago, anybody my age will know, that it's not long ago they just didn't see it, notice it. It was just part of the background. Now, at least you see it. The problems are there, but it's a moral advance that the problems are recognized to be there. There's some effort to come to terms with them.

The effective executive encourages opinions. But he insists that the people who voice them also think through what it is that the “experiment”—that is, the testing of the opinion against reality—would have to show. The effective executive, therefore, asks: “What do we have to know to test the validity of this hypothesis?” “What would the facts have to be to make this opinion tenable?

Now Where Do You Find Customers? When novice entrepreneurs search for opportunities, they too often look beyond their Zone of Influence. They think the action is happening somewhere else, in some other location or industry. But seasoned entrepreneurs almost always find and create opportunities within the context of who they are, what they know, and especially who they know. In each of the examples above, the business validation process begins with potential customers in the entrepreneur’s orbit. Actual people with names. Tribes you belong to or are interested in, most of whom are already self-organized online. People you know how to reach, today. Though it’s rarely a part of their official origin stories, the biggest companies in the world—even the viral apps now worth billions—started through personal networks and real human connections. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in a weekend by emailing friends to use it. Version 1 did well, validating it. And Microsoft started with Bill Gates building software for a guy in Albuquerque. He had a CUSTOMER FIRST. In the beginning, founders should reach out to their friends, their former colleagues, their communities. You may think your business is unique, but trust me, it’s not. Every successful business can start this way. For example, Anahita loves her dogs and wanted healthier snacks for them. She started taking her homemade organic dog treats to her local dog park. She would sell out every time. A year later she now has a store called the Barkery, a dog bakery. Before you even think about picking a business idea, make sure you have easy access to the people you want to help. An easy way to do this is to think about where you have easy access to a targeted group of people whom you really want to help—like, say, new moms in Austin, cyclists, freelance writers, and taco obsessives (like me!). CHALLENGE Top three groups. Let’s write out your top three groups to target. Who do you have easy access to that you’d be EXCITED to help? This can be your neighbors, colleagues, religious friends, golf buddies, cooking friends, etc. The better you understand your target group, the better you can speak to them. The more specifically you can speak to their problems, the better and easier you can sell (or test products). Note how this process prioritizes communication with people, through starting (taking the first iteration of your solution straight to customers) and asking (engaging them in a conversation to determine how your solution can best fix their problem). Business creation should always be a conversation! Nearly every impulse we have is to be tight with our ideas by doing more research, going off alone to build the perfect product—anything and everything to avoid the discomfort of asking for money. This is the validation shortcut. You have to learn to fight through this impulse. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be worth it.

Don’t act so smug when you haven’t been tested yet.” “Valid point. Test away. I’m your willing guinea pig.” Her laugh followed mine. “Tip: Never use the phrase guinea pig in the middle of sex.

If we were to make a list of the goals that are most important in life, surely the desire for close relationships, success in life (e.g., a career), and power would make most people’s short list. There is a long tradition in personality psychology of studying these three motives; indeed, psychologists such as H. A. Murray and David McClelland have argued that people’s level of needs for affiliation, achievement, and power are major components of human personality. There is growing evidence that these motives are an important part of the personality of the adaptive unconscious. Murray and McClelland assumed that these basic motives are not necessarily conscious and must therefore be measured indirectly. They advocated the use of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), in which people make up stories about a set of standard pictures, and these stories are then coded for how much of a need for affiliation, power, or achievement people expressed. Other researchers have developed explicit, self-report questionnaires of motives, with the assumption that people are aware of their motives and can freely report them. A controversy has ensued over which measure of motivation is the most valid: the TAT or self-report questionnaires. The answer, I suggest, is that both are valid measures but tap different levels of motivation, one that resides in the adaptive unconscious and the other that is part of people’s conscious explanatory system. David McClelland and his colleagues made this argument in an influential review of the literature. First, they noted that the self-report questionnaires and the TAT do not correlate with each other. If Sarah reports on a questionnaire that she has a high need for affiliation, we know virtually nothing about the level of this need that she will express, nonconsciously, on the TAT. Second, they argued that both techniques are valid measures of motivation, but of different types. The TAT assesses implicit motives, whereas explicit, self-report measures assess self-attributed motives.

[...] The statement "Botticelli's Birth of Venus is stunning", for starters, is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, because there is no experiment that might show this statement to be false. Parallax method and equations conventionally determined that the average distance between the Earth and the Moon is 384 400 Km (238 855 miles). Now, if we were to conduct hands-on investigation for its validation or an audit to demonstrate its falsification, direct testing of such a distance measure would require a scientist to physically travel the space with a giant ruler to calculate the scale between the two points. [...] The problem that scientific certainty is a myth still struggles to brush past the academic prejudice of most scientists who are green on critical analysis for its alleged pedagogical irrelevance.

Excellence in Statistics: Rigor Statisticians are specialists in coming to conclusions beyond your data safely—they are your best protection against fooling yourself in an uncertain world. To them, inferring something sloppily is a greater sin than leaving your mind a blank slate, so expect a good statistician to put the brakes on your exuberance. They care deeply about whether the methods applied are right for the problem and they agonize over which inferences are valid from the information at hand. The result? A perspective that helps leaders make important decisions in a risk-controlled manner. In other words, they use data to minimize the chance that you’ll come to an unwise conclusion. Excellence in Machine Learning: Performance You might be an applied machine-learning/AI engineer if your response to “I bet you couldn’t build a model that passes testing at 99.99999% accuracy” is “Watch me.” With the coding chops to build both prototypes and production systems that work and the stubborn resilience to fail every hour for several years if that’s what it takes, machine-learning specialists know that they won’t find the perfect solution in a textbook. Instead, they’ll be engaged in a marathon of trial and error. Having great intuition for how long it’ll take them to try each new option is a huge plus and is more valuable than an intimate knowledge of how the algorithms work (though it’s nice to have both). Performance means more than clearing a metric—it also means reliable, scalable, and easy-to-maintain models that perform well in production. Engineering excellence is a must. The result? A system that automates a tricky task well enough to pass your statistician’s strict testing bar and deliver the audacious performance a business leader demands. Wide Versus Deep What the previous two roles have in common is that they both provide high-effort solutions to specific problems. If the problems they tackle aren’t worth solving, you end up wasting their time and your money. A frequent lament among business leaders is, “Our data science group is useless.” And the problem usually lies in an absence of analytics expertise. Statisticians and machine-learning engineers are narrow-and-deep workers—the shape of a rabbit hole, incidentally—so it’s really important to point them at problems that deserve the effort. If your experts are carefully solving the wrong problems, your investment in data science will suffer low returns. To ensure that you can make good use of narrow-and-deep experts, you either need to be sure you already have the right problem or you need a wide-and-shallow approach to finding one.

exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision.

Six decades of study, however, have revealed conflicting, confusing, and inconclusive data.17 That’s right: there has never been a human study that successfully links low serotonin levels and depression. Imaging studies, blood and urine tests, postmortem suicide assessments, and even animal research have never validated the link between neurotransmitter levels and depression.18 In other words, the serotonin theory of depression is a total myth that has been unjustly supported by the manipulation of data. Much to the contrary, high serotonin levels have been linked to a range of problems, including schizophrenia and autism.19

Life sure can hit you hard! Suddenly, when you least expect it, WHAM; life has a knack for challenging you in ways that you don’t feel prepared for. I feel like life sometimes tests and shapes you in a manner in which you feel least equipped. It seems you don’t get to choose the exercise equipment God challenges and builds your strength with. When this is happening, it’s easy to drop into a victim mindset. It’s easy to feel stuck, defeated, and like you are a losing player in the game of life. This victim mindset argues (very loudly) that we have lost; that nothing good is on the horizon. Never forget that the volume of an argument does not reflect the validity of the argument. Just because the victim mentality argues that we are losing, doesn’t mean that it’s true. In fact, I have come to realize that during the times in my life where I thought I was losing, I was actually winning.

The test statistics of a t-test can be positive or negative, although this depends merely on which group has the larger mean; the sign of the test statistic has no substantive interpretation. Critical values (see Chapter 10) of the t-test are shown in Appendix C as (Student’s) t-distribution.4 For this test, the degrees of freedom are defined as n – 1, where n is the total number of observations for both groups. The table is easy to use. As mentioned below, most tests are two-tailed tests, and analysts find critical values in the columns for the .05 (5 percent) and .01 (1 percent) levels of significance. For example, the critical value at the 1 percent level of significance for a test based on 25 observations (df = 25 – 1 = 24) is 2.797 (and 1.11 at the 5 percent level of significance). Though the table also shows critical values at other levels of significance, these are seldom if ever used. The table shows that the critical value decreases as the number of observations increases, making it easier to reject the null hypothesis. The t-distribution shows one- and two-tailed tests. Two-tailed t-tests should be used when analysts do not have prior knowledge about which group has a larger mean; one-tailed t-tests are used when analysts do have such prior knowledge. This choice is dictated by the research situation, not by any statistical criterion. In practice, two-tailed tests are used most often, unless compelling a priori knowledge exists or it is known that one group cannot have a larger mean than the other. Two-tailed testing is more conservative than one-tailed testing because the critical values of two-tailed tests are larger, thus requiring larger t-test test statistics in order to reject the null hypothesis.5 Many statistical software packages provide only two-tailed testing. The above null hypothesis (men and women do not have different mean incomes in the population) requires a two-tailed test because we do not know, a priori, which gender has the larger income.6 Finally, note that the t-test distribution approximates the normal distribution for large samples: the critical values of 1.96 (5 percent significance) and 2.58 (1 percent significance), for large degrees of freedom (∞), are identical to those of the normal distribution. Getting Started Find examples of t-tests in the research literature. T-Test Assumptions Like other tests, the t-test has test assumptions that must be met to ensure test validity. Statistical testing always begins by determining whether test assumptions are met before examining the main research hypotheses. Although t-test assumptions are a bit involved, the popularity of the t-test rests partly on the robustness of t-test conclusions in the face of modest violations. This section provides an in-depth treatment of t-test assumptions, methods for testing the assumptions, and ways to address assumption violations. Of course, t-test statistics are calculated by the computer; thus, we focus on interpreting concepts (rather than their calculation). Key Point The t-test is fairly robust against assumption violations. Four t-test test assumptions must be met to ensure test validity: One variable is continuous, and the other variable is dichotomous. The two distributions have equal variances. The observations are independent. The two distributions are normally distributed. The first assumption, that one variable is continuous and the other dichotomous,

single or index variables. As an example, consider the dependent variable “high school violence,” discussed in Chapter 2. We ask: “What are the most important, distinct factors affecting or causing high school violence?” Some plausible factors are (1) student access to weapons, (2) student isolation from others, (3) peer groups that are prone to violence, (4) lack of enforcement of school nonviolence policies, (5) participation in anger management programs, and (6) familiarity with warning signals (among teachers and staff). Perhaps you can think of other factors. Then, following the strategies discussed in Chapter 3—conceptualization, operationalization, and index variable construction—we use either single variables or index measures as independent variables to measure each of these factors. This approach provides for the inclusion of programs or policies as independent variables, as well as variables that measure salient rival hypotheses. The strategy of full model specification requires that analysts not overlook important factors. Thus, analysts do well to carefully justify their model and to consult past studies and interview those who have direct experience with, or other opinions about, the research subject. Doing so might lead analysts to include additional variables, such as the socioeconomic status of students’ parents. Then, after a fully specified model has been identified, analysts often include additional variables of interest. These may be variables of lesser relevance, speculative consequences, or variables that analysts want to test for their lack of impact, such as rival hypotheses. Demographic variables, such as the age of students, might be added. When additional variables are included, analysts should identify which independent variables constitute the nomothetic explanation, and which serve some other purpose. Remember, all variables included in models must be theoretically justified. Analysts must argue how each variable could plausibly affect their dependent variable. The second part of “all of the variables that affect the dependent variable” acknowledges all of the other variables that are not identified (or included) in the model. They are omitted; these variables are not among “the most important factors” that affect the dependent variable. The cumulative effect of these other variables is, by definition, contained in the error term, described later in this chapter. The assumption of full model specification is that these other variables are justifiably omitted only when their cumulative effect on the dependent variable is zero. This approach is plausible because each of these many unknown variables may have a different magnitude, thus making it possible that their effects cancel each other out. The argument, quite clearly, is not that each of these other factors has no impact on the dependent variable—but only that their cumulative effect is zero. The validity of multiple regression models centers on examining the behavior of the error term in this regard. If the cumulative effect of all the other variables is not zero, then additional independent variables may have to be considered. The specification of the multiple regression model is as follows: