Work Redundancy Quotes

I never understood why you would ever feel the need to shoot the fish in the barrel. I mean, they're in a barrel, you've already caught them. The hard work's done, they can't escape. So if you want them dead, just drain the water out. Why bring guns into it?

I'm a citizen in a democracy. To call me an activist would be redundant. It's not a spectator sport. If we all become non-participants, it no longer works.

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.

The phrase "working mother" is redundant.

Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years. As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms: * Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. * Don't use no double negatives. * Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't. * Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed. * Do not put statements in the negative form. * Verbs has to agree with their subjects. * No sentence fragments. * Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. * Avoid commas, that are not necessary. * If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. * A writer must not shift your point of view. * Eschew dialect, irregardless. * And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. * Don't overuse exclamation marks!!! * Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. * Writers should always hyphenate between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyph-ens. * Write all adverbial forms correct. * Don't use contractions in formal writing. * Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. * It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms. * If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. * Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language. * Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors. * Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. * Never, ever use repetitive redundancies. * Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. * If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole. * Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration. * Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. * Always pick on the correct idiom. * "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'" * The adverb always follows the verb. * Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives." (New York Times, November 4, 1979; later also published in book form)

We all look for strategies or techniques that will free us from the pain of relationships and the hard work good relationships demand. We hope that better planning, more effective communication, clear role definitions, conflict resolution strategies, gender studies, and personality typing--to name just a few -- will make the difference. There may be value in these things, but if they were all we needed, Jesus' life, death, and resurrection would be unnecessary or, at best, redundant. Skills and techniques appeal to us because they promise that relational problems can be fixed by tweaking our behavior without altering the bent of our hearts. But the Bible says something very different. It says that Christ is the only real hope for relationships because only he can dig deep enough to address the core motivations and desires of our hearts. Most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength. Self-reliance is almost always a component of a bad relationship.

Throw away the rule book and create your own.

Ironically, the better we map this process, the harder it becomes to explain conscious feelings. The better we understand the brain, the more redundant the mind seems. If the entire system works by electric signals passing from here to there, why the hell do we also need to feel fear?

With a true masterpiece, there are no words required. Discourse is rendered redundant. That's why the work of a master transcends all notions of education, of class. It rises above the onlooker's understanding of what is considered good or bad, or right or wrong in the world of art. With the artist who has achieved mastery, skill, experience and knowledge are transparent, leaving only the message for all to see.

Chopin’s theme, a simple descending descant the first time round, articulated itself in the repeat with nuanced embellishment. It was music remembering itself. It meant something different, something more, to hear those simple phrases repeated so soon, qualified by chromatic variations. Clarifications. Not redundancy, but a hypothesis about how consolation works. A second chance at getting it. A second chance at life.

Well, the human genome has massive redundancy - that means that two per cent of the DNA does all the work of instructing the ribosomes that build the proteins that make up the cells of your body. Ninety-eight per cent of your DNA just sits there doing nothing. Taking up space in the gene.

Nothing is excluded and the unique nature of every aspect of creation is celebrated. This is how oneness works when it is not just a concept but a living presence. Many patterns and attachments that we think are essential to life will fall away, just as our present structures of power will become redundant. And the wonder of this change is that it need not be gradual, because it belongs to the now. Any real change is always a miracle - it happens through the grace of God.

Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.

In high school algebra, someone had already worked out the formulas. The teacher knew them or could find them in the teacher’s manual for the textbook. Imagine a word problem where nobody knows how to turn it into a formula, where some of the information is redundant and should not be used, where crucial information is often missing, and where there is no similar example worked out earlier in the textbook. This is what happens when one tries to apply statistical models to real-life problems.

and the other a man of atrabiliar aspect, with lank black hair, and a redundance of limp cravat — in fact, the sort of thing you might expect in men who distributed the publications of the Religious Tract Society, and introduced Dissenting hymns into the Church.

I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequence of emotions. You could swap out parts, replace them if they got too old. And this time you would build in some redundancy, if only just to handle the stress. One question was: Would the engine still work if you were aware of it, or if you were told how it actually functioned? Maybe this was one of the crucial differences between a story and a machine.

By the way, what is that you’re working on?” “Software-configurable RAID grid.” She pauses, a cable in each hand. “Go on, your ride will be waiting.” “RAID grid being . . . ?” “Redundant Array of Interconnected Demons.” She bares her teeth at him. “Demons!” he squeaks, and clutches his magic dice.

The workings of the sensory systems are particularly baffling, because they can achieve far more sophisticated feats of pattern-recognition than the best and most expensive man-made machines; if this were not so, all typists would be redundant, superseded by speech-recognizing machines, or machines for reading handwriting.

The brain is connected to the sense organs—eyes, ears, taste-buds, etc.—by means of cables called sensory nerves. The workings of the sensory systems are particularly baffling, because they can achieve far more sophisticated feats of pattern-recognition than the best and most expensive man-made machines; if this were not so, all typists would be redundant, superseded by speech-recognizing machines, or machines for reading handwriting. Human typists will be needed for many decades yet.

Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life. Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.

That's a daft name, so you're aware," Loki said. "SHARP Society. It doesn't mean anything and the S is redundant." "It stands for the Society for Hospitable Activities—" Mrs S began, but Loki interrupted. "Yes, I heard you the first time." "We picked an acronym and worked backwards," Theo muttered. "Perhaps you could find something more accurate. You could call yourselves the Society where Hospitality is Ignored Totally. Or, for short—" "Regardless of those trivialities, "we at the SHARP Society are dedicated to observing and intervening as necessary when beings from other realms travel to our planet.

The relationship between the Sophotechs and the men as depicted in that tale made no sense. How could they be hostile to each other?” Diomedes said, “Aren’t men right to fear machines which can perform all tasks men can do, artistic, intellectual, technical, a thousand or a million times better than they can do? Men become redundant.” Phaethon shook his head, a look of distant distaste on his features, as if he were once again confronted with a falsehood that would not die no matter how often it was denounced. In a voice of painstaking patience, he said: “Efficiency does not harm the inefficient. Quite the opposite. That is simply not the way it works. Take me, for example. Look around: I employed partials to do the thought-box junction spotting when I built this ship. My employees were not as skilled as I was in junction spotting. It took them three hours to do the robopsychology checks and hierarchy links I could have done in one hour. But they were in no danger of competition from me. My time is too valuable. In that same hour it would have taken me to spot their thought-box junction, I can earn far more than their three-hour wages by writing supervision architecture thought flows. And it’s the same with me and the Sophotechs. “Any midlevel Sophotech could have written in one second the architecture it takes me, even with my implants, an hour to compose. But if, in that same one second of time, that Sophotech can produce something more valuable—exploring the depth of abstract mathematics, or inventing a new scientific miracle, anything at all (provided that it will earn more in that second than I earn in an hour)—then the competition is not making me redundant. The Sophotech still needs me and receives the benefit of my labor. Since I am going to get the benefit of every new invention and new miracle put out on the market, I want to free up as many of those seconds of Sophotech time as my humble labor can do. “And I get the lion’s share of the benefit from the swap. I only save him a second of time; he creates wonder upon wonder for me. No matter what my fear of or distaste for Sophotechs, the forces in the marketplace, our need for each other, draw us together. “So you see why I say that not a thing the Silent One said about Sophotechs made sense. I do not understand how they could have afforded to hate each other. Machines don’t make us redundant; they increase our efficiency in every way. And the bids of workers eager to compete for Sophotech time creates a market for merely human work, which it would not be efficient for Sophotechs to underbid.

Marriage is inefficient!” she proclaims. “The whole construct is a model of wasted resources. The wife often stays home to care for the children, or even a single child, abandoning the career she worked so hard for, losing years of creative output. Beyond the wasting of talent, think of the physical waste. For every home, there are so many redundancies. How many toasters do you think there are in the world?” “I have no idea.” “Seriously, just guess.” “Ten million?” I say impatiently. “More than two hundred million! And how often do you think the average household uses its toaster?” Once again, she doesn’t wait for my answer. “Just 2.6 hours per year. Two hundred million toasters are sitting unused, statistically speaking, more than 99.97 percent of their active lives.

Moreover, although reference works existed on library shelves in available, and redundant, profusion, no direct access could be obtained to the banned, or burned, books of the three cosmologists, Xertigny, Yates and Zotov (pen names), who had recklessly started the whole business half a century earlier, causing, and endorsing, panic, demency and execrable romanchiks. All three scientists had vanished now: X had committed suicide; Y had been kidnapped by a laundryman and transported to Tartary; and Z, a ruddy, white-whiskered old sport, was driving his Yakima jailers crazy by means of incomprehensible crepitations, ceaseless invention of invisible inks, chameleonizations, nerve signals, spirals of out-going lights and feats of ventriloquism that imitated pistol shots and sirens.

To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other. This rule is part of good police procedure. When there are multiple witnesses to an event, they are not allowed to discuss it before giving their testimony. The goal is not only to prevent collusion by hostile witnesses, it is also to prevent unbiased witnesses from influencing each other. Witnesses who exchange their experiences will tend to make similar errors in their testimony, reducing the total value of the information they provide. Eliminating redundancy from your sources of information is always a good idea. The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days.

They did this at the bank I worked at. We all had to go on a course where bright, sparkly people with frightening smiles exhorted us to embrace change because those who can’t die out. I think they cited the dinosaurs.’ ‘So they weren’t killed by an asteroid at all, then?’ said Bashford, astonished. ‘Not according to the expensive people hired to tell us that our expertise, the working relationships we’d built up over the years, all our hard work was now utterly valueless – as would we be if we didn’t get with the new programme. According to them, it was their inability to adapt to this month’s new ideas and working practices that did for the dinosaurs and the asteroid had nothing to do with it. They were quite horrified at our lack of enthusiasm for massive redundancies while senior managers – reluctantly, of course – accepted promotions and pay rises with increased bonuses.

Father is perpetually underestimating me. I’ve done extensive reading and background work on this whole area.’ ‘Is that so, sir?’ ‘I’ve thought about virtually nothing else for the past month.’ ‘Really, sir. In that case, perhaps my message is rather redundant.’ ‘You can assure Father I’m very well briefed indeed. This attaché case’ – he nudged it with his foot – ‘is chock-full of notes on every possible angle one can imagine.’ ‘Is that so, sir?’ ‘I really think I’ve thought through every permutation the human mind is capable of. I wish you’d reassure Father of that.’ ‘I will, sir.’ Mr Cardinal seemed to relax a little. He prodded once more his attaché case – which I felt inclined to keep my eyes averted from – and said: ‘I suppose you’ve been wondering why I never let go of this case. Well, now you know. Imagine if the wrong person opened it.’ ‘That would be most awkward, sir.

Sadly, we were going to have to flee. We’d need to find somewhere new, and soon, and that would mean paying for our own security. I went back to my notebooks, started contacting security firms again. Meg and I sat down to work out exactly how much security we could afford, and how much house. Exactly then, while we were revising our budget, word came down: Pa was cutting me off. I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-thirties being financially cut off by his father. But Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf. I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.) Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being prohibited from learning independence. After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilized, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature? For not standing on my own two feet? The question of how to pay for a home and security kept Meg and me awake at nights. We could always spend some of my inheritance from Mummy, we said, but that felt like a last resort. We saw that money as belonging to Archie. And his sibling. It was then that we learned Meg was pregnant.

We will need comprehensive policies and programs that make low-carbon choices easy and convenient for everyone. Most of all, these policies need to be fair, so that the people already struggling to cover the basics are not being asked to make additional sacrifice to offset the excess consumption of the rich. That means cheap public transit and clean light rail accessible to all; affordable, energy-efficient housing along those transit lines; cities planned for high-density living; bike lanes in which riders aren’t asked to risk their lives to get to work; land management that discourages sprawl and encourages local, low-energy forms of agriculture; urban design that clusters essential services like schools and health care along transit routes and in pedestrian-friendly areas; programs that require manufacturers to be responsible for the electronic waste they produce, and to radically reduce built-in redundancies and obsolescences.

Leonid Gavrilov, a researcher at the University of Chicago, argues that human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually. As engineers have long recognized, simple devices typically do not age. They function reliably until a critical component fails, and the whole thing dies in an instant. A windup toy, for example, works smoothly until a gear rusts or a spring breaks, and then it doesn’t work at all. But complex systems—power plants, say—have to survive and function despite having thousands of critical, potentially fragile components. Engineers therefore design these machines with multiple layers of redundancy: with backup systems, and backup systems for the backup systems. The backups may not be as efficient as the first-line components, but they allow the machine to keep going even as damage accumulates. Gavrilov argues that, within the parameters established by our genes, that’s exactly how human beings appear to work. We have an extra kidney, an extra lung, an extra gonad, extra teeth.

To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other. This rule is part of good police procedure. When there are multiple witnesses to an event, they are not allowed to discuss it before giving their testimony. The goal is not only to prevent collusion by hostile witnesses, it is also to prevent unbiased witnesses from influencing each other. Witnesses who exchange their experiences will tend to make similar errors in their testimony, reducing the total value of the information they provide. Eliminating redundancy from your sources of information is always a good idea. The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.

I suggest you stand slowly and walk out with my men,” Zrakovi said, tapping a napkin against his lying, two-faced mouth and putting a twenty on the table to cover the drinks. “If you make a scene, innocent humans will be injured. I have a Blue Congress cleanup team in place, however, so if you want to fight in public and damage a few humans, knock yourself out. It will only add to your list of crimes.” I stood slowly, gritting my teeth when Squirrel Chin patted me down while feeling me up and making it look like a romantic moment. He’d been so busy feeling the naughty bits that he missed both Charlie, sitting in my bag next to my foot, and the dagger attached to my inner forearm. Idiot. Alex would never have been so sloppy. If Alex had patted me down, he’d have found not only the weapons but also the portable magic kit. From the corner of my eye, I saw a tourist taking mobile phone shots of us. He’d no doubt email them to all his friends back home with stories of those crazy New Orleanians and their public displays of affection. I considered pretending to faint, but I was too badly outnumbered for it to work. Like my friend Jean Lafitte, whose help I could use about now, I didn’t want to try something unless it had a reasonable chance at succeeding. I also didn’t want to pull Charlie out and risk humans getting hurt. “Walk out the door onto Chartres and turn straight toward the cathedral.” Zrakovi pulled his jacket aside enough for me to see a shoulder holster. I hadn’t even known the man could hold a gun, although for all I knew about guns it could be a water pistol. The walk to the cathedral transport was three very long city blocks. My best escape opportunity would be near Jackson Square. When the muscular goons tried to turn me left toward the cathedral, I’d try to break and run right toward the river, where I could get lost among the wharves and docks long enough to draw and power a transport. Of course in order to run, I’d have to get away from the clinch of Dreadlocks and Squirrel Chin. Charlie could take care of that. I slipped the messenger bag over my head slowly, and not even Zrakovi noticed the stick of wood protruding from the top by a couple of inches. Not to be redundant, but . . . idiots. None of us spoke as we proceeded down Chartres Street, where, to our south, the clouds continued to build. The wind had grown stronger and drier. The hurricane was sucking all the humidity out of the air, all the better to gain intensity. I hoped Zrakovi, a Bostonian, would enjoy his first storm. I hoped a live oak landed on his head.

I was hoping to be able to get into the Queen's Chamber while I was in Egypt in 1986 to get a sample of the salt for analysis. I had speculated that the salt on the walls of the chamber was an unwanted, though significant, residual substance caused by a chemical reaction where hot hydrogen reacted with the limestone. Unfortunately, I was unable to get into the chamber because a French team was already inside the Horizontal Passage, boring holes into what they hoped were additional chambers. (It was discovered, after I left Egypt, that the spaces contained only sand.) As it turned out, my research would have been redundant. Noone reported in his book that another individual had already had the same idea and done the work. In 1978, Dr. Patrick Flanagan asked the Arizona Bureau of Geology and Mineral Technology to analyze a sample of this salt. They found it to be a mixture of calcium carbonate (limestone), sodium chloride (halite or salt), and calcium sulfate (gypsum, also known as plaster of paris). These are precisely the minerals that would be produced by the reaction of hot, hydrogen-bearing gas with the limestone walls and ceiling of the Queen's Chamber. [...] The interior chambers of the Great Pyramid have the appearance of being subjected to extreme temperatures; and [...] the broken corner on the granite box shows signs of being melted, rather than simply being chipped away.

Stanford University’s John Koza, who pioneered genetic programming in 1986, has used genetic algorithms to invent an antenna for NASA, create computer programs for identifying proteins, and invent general purpose electrical controllers. Twenty-three times Koza’s genetic algorithms have independently invented electronic components already patented by humans, simply by targeting the engineering specifications of the finished devices—the “fitness” criteria. For example, Koza’s algorithms invented a voltage-current conversion circuit (a device used for testing electronic equipment) that worked more accurately than the human-invented circuit designed to meet the same specs. Mysteriously, however, no one can describe how it works better—it appears to have redundant and even superfluous parts. But that’s the curious thing about genetic programming (and “evolutionary programming,” the programming family it belongs to). The code is inscrutable. The program “evolves” solutions that computer scientists cannot readily reproduce. What’s more, they can’t understand the process genetic programming followed to achieve a finished solution. A computational tool in which you understand the input and the output but not the underlying procedure is called a “black box” system. And their unknowability is a big downside for any system that uses evolutionary components. Every step toward inscrutability is a step away from accountability, or fond hopes like programming in friendliness toward humans. That doesn’t mean scientists routinely lose control of black box systems. But if cognitive architectures use them in achieving AGI, as they almost certainly will, then layers of unknowability will be at the heart of the system. Unknowability might be an unavoidable consequence of self-aware, self-improving software.

We say “universe” and the word makes us think of a possible unification of things. One can be a spiritualist, a materialist, a pantheist, just as one can be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied with common sense: the fact remains that one always conceives of one or several simple principles by which the whole of material and moral things might be explained. This is because our intelligence loves simplicity. It seeks to reduce effort, and insists that nature was arranged in such a way as to demand of us, in order to be thought, the least possible labor. It therefore provides itself with the exact minimum of elements and principles with which to recompose the indefinite series of objects and events. But if instead of reconstructing things ideally for the greater satisfaction of our reason we confine ourselves purely and simply to what is given us by experience, we should think and express ourselves in quite another way. While our intelligence with its habits of economy imagines effects as strictly proportioned to their causes, nature, in its extravagance, puts into the cause much more than is required to produce the effect. While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary,—too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything. Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. Between this reality and the one constructed by the philosophers, I believe he would have established the same relation as between the life we live every day and the life which actors portray in the evening on the stage. On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done; the scenes are clear-cut; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures made, there are no sharply-drawn situations; nothing happens as simply or as completely or as nicely as we should like; the scenes overlap; things neither begin nor end; there is no perfectly satisfying ending, nor absolutely decisive gesture, none of those telling words which give us pause: all the effects are spoiled. Such is human life.

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers… Parents and other passengers read on Kindles… Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing… As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago… My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading… Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19thand 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts… Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another dimension: physicality. Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen’s group emphasize that the sense of touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to information – a kind of “geometry” to words, and a spatial “thereness” for text. As Piper notes, human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination – what he calls the “technology of recurrence”. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our youth skim on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages “looking back.

What is scarce? Surely time is scarce? This is true in the sense that we get only one life, but yet again there are ways in which competition and how we use our time can make us feel an artificial sense of time scarcity. Each time we are able to build on the work of others with confidence, each time we use the elements of life pulled from our commonwealth of agricultural knowledge, we bundle time, and so get the benefit of having multiple lifetimes. Each time nature uses genetic code that has been developed over millions of years, millions of years of development are collapsed into something that works in our lifetimes. Each time we add to that collection, we are putting our lifetimes' work into a useful form for the benefit of future generations. At the same time, yes, we each have only our own single lives in which to pursue happiness. The goal is to spend as much of that time in a framework of sharing abundance rather than having it squeezed into a life of scarcity and competition. In contrast, we need not look far to find lots of frustrating examples in which our time is treated as abundant when we would rather have it be valued as scarce. It happens each time we must stand in line at the DMV, fill out redundant forms at the hospital, reproduce others' efforts by spending time searching for knowledge or data that already exists somewhere, create a report that no one reads. In those cases, we are creating and living in artificial and unnecessary time scarcity. Time is indeed one of the most curious elements of life, especially since our lifetimes and those of plants and animals all move at different rates. We know, for example, that the urgency to address climate change is really on our human scale, not geologic scale. The Earth has been through greater upheavals and mass extinctions and will likely go through them again, but for the narrowest of narrow bands of human history on Earth, we require very specific conditions for us to continue to thrive as a species. To keep our planet within a habitable and abundant balance, we have, as Howard Buffet noted, only 'forty seasons' to learn and adjust. That is why building on one another's work is so important. One farmer can have the benefit of forty seasons and pass some of that experience down, but if 1,000 farmers do the same, there is the collective benefit of 1,000 years in a single year. If a million people participate, then a million years of collective experience are available. If we are then able to compound knowledge across generations and deepen our understanding of human and natural history, we add even greater richness. It is in this way of bundling our experiences for continual improvement, with compound interest, that time shifts from a scarce resource to being far less of a constraint, if not truly abundant. However, for time to be compounded, knowledge must be shared, and real resources, energy, and infrastructure must exist and function to support and grow our commonwealth of knowledge.

You do an amazing job at work, doing work that is your job. Thank you for being a part of Team Redundancy!


When Tolkien drew his maps and covered them with names, he felt no need to bring all the names into the story. They do their work by suggesting that there is a world outside the story, that the story is only a selection; and the same goes for the hints of other creatures unaffected by and uninterested in the main plot. Middle- earth is different from its many imitators in its density, its redundancy, and consequently its depth...

Integration databases—don’t do it! Seriously! Not even with views. Not even with stored procedures. Take it up a level, and wrap a web service around the database. Then make the web service redundant and accessed through a virtual IP. Build a test harness to verify what happens when the web service is down. That’s an enterprise integration technology. Reaching into another system’s database is just…icky. Nothing hobbles a system’s ability to adapt quite like having other systems poking into its guts. Database “integrations” are pure evil. They violate encapsulation and information hiding by exposing the most intimate details about a system’s inner workings. They encourage inappropriate coupling at both the structural and semantic levels. Even worse, the system that hangs its database out for the world cannot trust the data in the database at all. Rows can be added or modified by other entities even while the owner has objects in memory mapped from those rows. Vital application logic can be bypassed, resulting in illegal or unreachable states.[119]

The biopolitical effect of semiocapitalism (better said: the thanatological effect of semiocapitalism) is essentially the capture of cognitive activity, and the subjection of the faculty of expression of the linguistic animal to the sleepless, aggressive dynamics of the labour market. Language is captured by the networked machine and turned into an essentially productive activity. Herein lies the trap: people are encouraged to consider their linguistic competence as factors of economic competition, and to manage and invest in them as such. Creativity, expressiveness, affection, emotion – the human soul, in other words – are considered to be productive factors, and consequently, they are evaluated according to standards of productivity. Exploitation, competition, precariousness, redundancy are not perceived as the effects of a conflictual social relationship, but are internalized as deficiencies of the self, as personal inadequacies. The unceasing restructuring of the organization of work is perceived as humiliation and brutality.

Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.

I suggest you stand slowly and walk out with my men,” Zrakovi said, tapping a napkin against his lying, two-faced mouth and putting a twenty on the table to cover the drinks. “If you make a scene, innocent humans will be injured. I have a Blue Congress cleanup team in place, however, so if you want to fight in public and damage a few humans, knock yourself out. It will only add to your list of crimes.” I stood slowly, gritting my teeth when Squirrel Chin patted me down while feeling me up and making it look like a romantic moment. He’d been so busy feeling the naughty bits that he missed both Charlie, sitting in my bag next to my foot, and the dagger attached to my inner forearm. Idiot. Alex would never have been so sloppy. If Alex had patted me down, he’d have found not only the weapons but also the portable magic kit. From the corner of my eye, I saw a tourist taking mobile phone shots of us. He’d no doubt email them to all his friends back home with stories of those crazy New Orleanians and their public displays of affection. I considered pretending to faint, but I was too badly outnumbered for it to work. Like my friend Jean Lafitte, whose help I could use about now, I didn’t want to try something unless it had a reasonable chance at succeeding. I also didn’t want to pull Charlie out and risk humans getting hurt. “Walk out the door onto Chartres and turn straight toward the cathedral.” Zrakovi pulled his jacket aside enough for me to see a shoulder holster. I hadn’t even known the man could hold a gun, although for all I knew about guns it could be a water pistol. The walk to the cathedral transport was three very long city blocks. My best escape opportunity would be near Jackson Square. When the muscular goons tried to turn me left toward the cathedral, I’d try to break and run right toward the river, where I could get lost among the wharves and docks long enough to draw and power a transport. Of course in order to run, I’d have to get away from the clinch of Dreadlocks and Squirrel Chin. Charlie could take care of that. I slipped the messenger bag over my head slowly, and not even Zrakovi noticed the stick of wood protruding from the top by a couple of inches. Not to be redundant, but . . . idiots. None of us spoke as we proceeded down Chartres Street, where, to our south, the clouds continued to build. The wind had grown stronger and drier. The hurricane was sucking all the humidity out of the air, all the better to gain intensity. I hoped Zrakovi, a Bostonian, would enjoy his first storm. I hoped a live oak landed on his head.

Seventeen hundred years ago, key elements of our ancient heritage were lost, relegated to the elite priesthoods and esoteric traditions of the day. In an effort to simplify the loosely organized religious and historic traditions of his time, early in the fourth century A.D. the Roman emperor Constantine formed a council of historians and scholars. What would later be known as the Council of Nice fulfilled the directive of its charter and recommended that at least twenty-five documents be modified or removed from the collection of texts.1 The committee found many of the works under consideration to be redundant, with overlapping stories and repeated parables. Other manuscripts were so abstract and in some cases so mystical that they were believed to be beyond any practical value. Additionally, another twenty supporting documents were removed, held in reserve for privileged researchers and select scholars. The remaining books were condensed and rearranged, to give them greater meaning and make them more accessible to the common reader. Each of these decisions contributed to further confusing the mystery of our purpose, possibilities, and relationship to one another. Following the accomplishment of their task, the council produced a single document in A.D. 325. The result of their labor remains with us as perhaps one of the most controversial texts of sacred history. It is known today as the Holy Bible.

The amount of work it takes to compute something had been mostly disregarded—set aside—in all the theorizing based on Turing machines, which work, after all, so ploddingly. Bennett brought it back. There is no logical depth in the parts of a message that are sheer randomness and unpredictability, nor is there logical depth in obvious redundancy—plain repetition and copying. Rather, he proposed, the value of a message lies in “what might be called its buried redundancy—parts predictable only with difficulty, things the receiver could in principle have figured out without being told, but only at considerable cost in money, time, or computation

I’ve never been completely against the educational system, but I’ve never been completely for it either. So where does that logic reside?―in relevance to the receiver. If it works for you, then it’s good for you. But it’s not a one size fits all. Some course designers simply don’t have the capability to tailor exact fit strategies for certain intellectual shapes and sizes. Originality is the key here, the punchline to all of this (redundant to me) assessing and equating that I implore you to embrace or at the very least consider.

What you felt, my friend, is a redundant, bargain-basement version of fear, a type of fear that was easy enough to overcome: with rational thought, with a brisk walk, with a steaming mug of coffee, or a scalding hot shower. Breathe slowly, count to ten. Think nice thoughts. The type of fright that evaporated and retreated from memory the moment you opened your curtains and let the sun stream into your life. Are you shaking your head at me right now? Perhaps you think I’m being unfair. Maybe I am. Hell, the way the world has gone to shit in these last few months... it’s hard to imagine you haven’t seen enough to turn your brain into deep-fried calamari. I’ll speculate a little: by now, you’ve probably seen one of... them in the flesh, haven't you? One of the bugs, I mean. Up close. Well, what else would I mean? What else is there, these days, to talk about?

If there is one place we should begin, it is with a resolve to not conceal sins, to not seal ourselves off from people's suffering by burying it under a mountain of vacuous bullshit. Euphemisms are an attempt to find pleasant words for an ugly reality, and in doing so, they allow their users to avoid feeling guilty or uncomfortable. This is why they are particularly common in the business world, where executives do not want to admit that they are ruining a lot of people's lives through mass firings and so discuss restructuring, outsourcing, redundancy, and streamlining. An independent contractor is a worker who has no benefits or guaranteed hours, and increasing efficiency often means making people do more work in less time.

The difficulty is that we get ourselves caught in a double bind: we work so hard that we do not allow ourselves time to dream, and therefore we continue to work hard because we have not had the time to dream up an alternative. If you are ever sacked or made redundant, then I suggest you thank the good Lord above.

For a presentation assignment, you might pick a day 2 weeks in advance of the actual presentations and ask students to bring their laptops to class. In the final 10 minutes of a class in which you present some new material to them, ask them to pair up and work together on the creation of a single slide designed to teach an audience about Concept A. In the following class sessions, allot the final 10 minutes of each class to asking a handful of students to stand up and give a 2-minute presentation of the slide they created. Better yet, as in the writing example, make it the final 15 minutes and spend the first 5 of those reminding them that reading text directly from slides can produce something called the redundancy effect, which can reduce learning, but that too much difference between what's on the slide and what they say also has been shown to reduce learning. So they should be searching for what Michelle Miller described as the “‘Goldilocks’ principle with respect to the discrepancy between the narration and the visually presented slide”—they should clearly reference and highlight the key components of what they have put on the slide, but not simply read it out directly (Miller 2014, p. 154). Giving students the opportunity to create several practice slides and then to work on speaking those slides to an audience would go a long way toward improving the majority of student presentations I have seen.

If, however, we hear the phrase “entirely sanctified” like we hear the phrase “entirely married,” we'd be tempted to think it redundant. Is there any way to be married without being “entirely married”? Is there any other way to be faithful than to be “entirely faithful”? Marriage only exists as an entire and complete binding of our lives and trajectories to those of another, and even the things that happen beforehand take their significance from that reality. Likewise, there is no way for us to relate deeply to God and function as God's agent in the world unless we are entirely about the business of becoming more and more like God, entirely about the business of being sanctified. This is also why we only talk about “entire sanctification” and never “entire holiness.” The point is to be fully engaged, not to be fully finished. That will not happen until Christ returns and God finishes the work of new creation.[

in the case of the miners, there was an alternative. It did not make economic sense to close the mines. The Oxford economist Andrew Glyn convincingly argued that even if the pits were as uneconomic as the NCB suggested (and in fact many still had sufficient resources to merit mining for decades to come), the resulting unemployment would oblige the NCB and the taxpayer funding larger retirement pensions, thousands of redundancy payments and millions of pounds in unemployment benefit. It was cheaper to keep the miners in work.

Miller argues, some uses of multimedia in teaching have been shown to detract from learning, instead of supporting or enhancing it. For example, if you are showing a slide presentation to students, and narrating over your slides – as you might do for a simple video in an online course – the impact on student learning might well depend on how you decide to handle the content of the slides. Simply reading the words on the slides can produce what the research calls the redundancy effect, which will actually hurt student learning; but you can err at the other extreme as well, and interfere with learning by not paying enough attention to the slides. What works best – Miller describes it as the “Goldilocks” principle – is a close but not perfect relation between slides and narration, and when the narration occurs in conversational language (Miller, 2014, p. 154).

I would like to say at the outset that I have little or no interest in mindlessly categorising individuals, and certainly not of “reducing” them to mere labels. If I attempt to group together certain individuals’ experiences, it is to better understand them, their distress and motiva- tions, and what underlies their difficulties. As will become clear, in one sense the term borderline becomes redundant, as the individual’s par- ticular early relational experiences are understood to play the central role in their development and life experience. Yet even these do not ultimately “define” the individual, but rather, through understanding and working through their traumatic experience, the individual can be freed to fully develop, use, and manifest themselves in satisfying and fulfilling ways. The term borderline is, for me, left as a signifier of the particular kinds of reasons that the individual’s struggle to reach this position may have been so difficult.

Think about it: Where are the redundancies in your own life? Where’s the emergency brake or the spare tire in your company? How will you deal with the loss of a valuable team member, a critical distributor, or an important client? What will you do if your household loses a source of income? The system must be designed to continue operating even if a component fails.

… as you know, here at Randolph Media we reward hard work.” Lisa twinkled prettily at the patent lie. Like many companies in the Western world, Randolph Media rewarded hard work with poor pay, increasing workloads, demotions and on-a-second’s redundancies.

It’s difficult to imagine that Artificial Intelligence will take the place of people but many believe that it’s only a short time before computers will outthink us. They already can beat our best chess players and have been able to out calculate us since calculators first came onto the scene. IBM’s Watson is on the cutting edge of Cognitive Computers, being used to out think our physicians but closer to home, for the greatest part; our cars are no longer assembled by people but rather robots. Our automobiles can be considered among our first robots, since they took the place of horses. Just after the turn of the last century when the population in the United States crossed the 100 M mark the number of horses came to 20M. Now we have a population of 325 M but only 9 M horses. You might ask what happened. Well back in 1915 there were 2.4 M cars but this jumped to 3.6 M in just one year. Although horses still out-numbered cars the handwriting was on the wall! You might think that this doesn’t apply to us but why not? The number of robots increase, taking the place of first our workers on the assembly line and then workers in the food industry and this takes us from tractors and combines on the farms to the cooking and serving hamburgers at your favorite burger joint. People are becoming redundant! That’s right we are becoming superfluous! Worldwide only 7 out of 100 people have college degrees and here in the United States only 40% of our working population possesses a sheep skin, although mine is printed on ordinary paper. With education becoming ever more expensive, we as a population are becoming ever more uneducated. A growing problem is that as computers and robots become smarter, as they are, we are no longer needed to be anything more than a consumer and where will the money come from for that? I recently read that this death spiral will run its course within 40 years! Nice statistics that we’re looking at…. Looking at the bright side of things you can now buy an atomically correct, life sized doll, as perhaps a robotic non-complaining, companion for under $120. In time these robotic beings will be able to talk back but hopefully there will be an off switch. As interesting as this sounds it will most likely not be for everyone, however it may appeal to some of our less capable, not to have to actually interface with real live people. The fact is that most people will soon outlive their usefulness! We as a society are being challenged and there will soon be little reason for our being. When machines make machines that can out think us; when we become dumb and superfluous, then what? Are we ready for this transition? It’s scary but If nothing else, it’s something to think about….

The configuration in Example 33-8 works, but in many cases, routers might have multiple ntp server commands configured for redundancy. The goal is to have at least one usable clock source (servers per multiple ntp server commands, or internal clock as per the ntp master command). The router then chooses the best NTP clock source based on the stratum level. The stratum level defines the quality of the clock source; the lower the stratum, the better the source.

Touch Points Are there redundant or unnecessary processes that can be eliminated (e.g., excessive approvals)? Are there redundant or unnecessary handoffs that can be eliminated or combined (e.g., work that can be done by a single department)? Are there processes or handoffs that need to be added?

Technology Is redundant or unnecessary technology involved? Is the available technology fully utilized? Are the systems interconnected to optimize data movement?

With his redundancy payment dwindling fast, I couldn’t afford to take the unpaid part of my maternity leave, so I went back to work after thirty-nine weeks.

Those in middle class occupations are reduced to selling their labour power just like the working class. Rounds of redundancies, longer unpaid working hours and the concomitant anxieties of employment in a 'flexible' and 'competitive' labour market tend to reduce all to the misery of wage slavery.

Simplicity is simple. Perhaps this sounds redundant. But it’s true, and it’s important. If you’re searching for success—whether you’re starting a business, already working in one, or thinking about switching to a new career— think simple.

Librarians have proven over and over that the profession is capable of extraordinary collaboration. More than forty years ago, a group of major libraries in Ohio recognized the importance of shared computing resources and established a partnership called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which is now referred to primarily by its acronym. OCLC calls itself “the world’s largest library collaborative.” The library data and services provided by OCLC to 70,000 libraries around the world enables libraries to avoid a great deal of redundant work.

Librarians have proven over and over that the profession is capable of extraordinary collaboration. More than forty years ago, a group of major libraries in Ohio recognized the importance of shared computing resources and established a partnership called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which is now referred to primarily by its acronym. OCLC calls itself “the world’s largest library collaborative.” The library data and services provided by OCLC to 70,000 libraries around the world enables libraries to avoid a great deal of redundant work.9 The OCLC partnership has reduced the need for every library to create its own catalog record for every book or item it collects, creating enormous efficiencies. OCLC’s WorldCat system, for instance, allows anyone with web access to search across the catalogs of a large number of libraries to locate books wherever they are in the country. WorldCat is simple, but it has proved that implementing even the simplest of systems can be remarkably useful to library patrons.

By contrast, what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out. And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.

The Death of Standards On his way to work, a council health and safety official deliberately knocks over a pedestrian and drives on. Bizarrely, upon arriving at his office he launches into a heartfelt tirade against hit and run drivers. Meanwhile, the department's team leader instigates a series of compulsory redundancies then appears on a local TV news programme to protest against the sackings in the strongest possible terms. Strangely, Jenny Carver – working as a temp in the office – seems to be the only one aware of her colleagues’ paradoxical behaviour. Finding herself trapped in a world where everybody really is their own worst enemy, she begins to suspect there may be some kind of supernatural intelligence at work.

The first shot has played itself out on the screen. . . . To linger on it after our actor has left the scene is to leave our viewer with “cold coffee.” . . . If the viewer is not confused or disappointed, he will simply be bored. It has been many years since a mere picture projected on the screen was considered amazing or amusing. Every part of a film must deliver its message, but the only message delivered by redundant frames of film is that the cutter was inept or too lazy to cut them off.

A habit is a redundant set of automatic unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that develop through repetition. It’s when you’ve done something so many times that your body is programmed to become the mind. Over time, your body is dragging you to a predictable future based on what you’ve been doing in the past. Therefore, if you’re not in the present moment, you’re probably in a program. The fact is, there’s no room for the unknown in a predictable life. But being predictable is not how the unknown works. The unknown is unfamiliar, uncertain—but it’s also exciting because it occurs in ways you cannot expect or anticipate.

Focus on strained external relationships, and begin to repair them. Cut out redundant meetings, shorten excessively long ones, or improve problems with physical work spaces.

Commit to mastering three to four new words every day. People with a rich vocabulary seldom have trouble articulating their views and display greater confidence while talking to people. The difference between a functional vocabulary and extensive vocabulary can be the difference between a black and white and vivid, colorful picture. Paint a picture with your words to make the conversation more interesting and compelling. Stay away from redundant words and phrases. Avoid using conversation fillers. Keep your sentences short, crisp and to the point. Do not use the most highfalutin words to flaunt your vocabulary. Instead be an effective communicator by using words that convey your ideas and feelings most appropriately. Less is always more in a conversation. Try to say more by using less yet effective words and phrases. Think of better and more articulate ways to convey your emotions and ideas, For example, you can say “famished” in place of “very hungry” or “livid” instead of “very angry or upset.” Try to convey your ideas using more effective words. Replace redundant words and phrases in your daily conversations. For example, instead of saying, “They said xyz about my looks” say “they commented on my looks.” The idea is to make your speech crisper, more articulate and tighter by replacing ineffectual words/phrases with more meaningful expressions. Everyday words and phrases such as “big” can become “gigantic,” “massive” or “colossal.” Similarly, scared can become “petrified” and “spooked,” hungry become “famished” and so on. Consciously think of more effective ways to convey the same meaning. This practice will make you come across as a more engaging, interesting and vibrant conversationalist. A richer and more power-packed vocabulary lends more character, feelings and sensory experiences to the conversation. The way to go about it is – Use a diary or notebook for listing new words and phrases you come across each day. You can also randomly pick three new words to learn from the dictionary every day, and try to use it in your speech or conversation. Install ‘word a day’ applications on your phones to keep enriching your vocabulary. It’s a work in progress. You’ll never know everything. Even if you believe you have a limited vocabulary or aren’t able to hold a conversation because you don’t know how best to express yourself, breathe easy. There are plenty of ways to build a powerful vocabulary if you have the initiative.

As Marshall’s Ben Powers explained: “The whole concept of redundancy is that if the primary system doesn’t function, the secondary system will. Therefore, if the primary system fails and the secondary system backs it up, the system is working as expected. Building in redundancy is expensive. You don’t build it in unless you expect to use it.

Regardless of where the platform resides, ask the vendor these important questions: What’s your disaster recovery plan? How will failovers work? Do you have in-region redundancy? Are you working with multiple public cloud and/or data center providers?

STS-1 affirmed these choices and what was to become the dominant ideology of the work group in the years preceding the Challenger tragedy: the belief in redundancy.

Earlier this morning,' Bukka told him, 'I entertained our great and wise sage, Vidyasagar, the Ocean of Knowledge, and I suggested to him that his masterwork-in-progress, his inquiry into the Sixteen Systems of Philosophy, was reportedly of a brilliance so extraordinary that it would be a tragedy if it ended up incomplete, unfinished, because of the distractions of his work at court. I also took the liberty to mention that astrology was not my personal cup of tea, so that the daily morning horoscope readings demanded by my brother would no longer be required. I must say that on the whole he took it very well. He is a man of infinite grace, and when he let out a single wordless ejaculation—a 'ha!' so loud that it frightened the horses in the stables—I understood this to be part of his transcendent spiritual practice, a controlled exhalation from his body in which he expelled all that was now redundant. A letting-go. After that he took his leave and I believe he has retreated into his original cave of so long ago, near the perimeter of the Mandana complex, to begin a ninety-one-day program of meditation and soul renewal. I know that we will all be grateful for the fruits of this disciplined activity and for the rebirth of his spirit in an even more bountiful incarnation. He is the greatest of us all.' 'You fired him,' Haleya Kote dared to summarize.

Such duplications often happen when cells divide and DNA is copied. They’re mistakes, but fortuitous ones, for they provide a redundant copy of a gene that evolution can tinker with without disrupting the work of the original. That’s exactly what happened with the long-opsin gene. One of the two copies stayed roughly the same, absorbing light at 560 nanometers. The other gradually shifted to a shorter wavelength of 530 nanometers, becoming what we now call the medium (green) opsin.

From the early development period of the Space Shuttle through the end of 1985, the SRB work group had consistently defined the SRB joints as an acceptable risk. Behind this determination was a scientific paradigm that established the redundancy of the joint. The belief in redundancy and the scientific paradigm behind it were institutionalized prior to 1986. They were crucial components of the worldview that many decision makers brought to the teleconference on the eve of the Challenger launch.

The belief in redundancy was the product of the work group culture and the incremental accretion of history, ideas, and routines about the booster joints that began in 1977. It was based on a scientific paradigm in the Kuhnian sense: agreed-upon procedures for inquiry, categories into which observations were fitted, and a technology including beliefs about cause-effect relations and standards of practice in relation to it. These traits, reinforced by the cultural meaning systems that contributed to its institutionalization, gave the belief in redundancy the sort of obduracy Kuhn remarked upon.

Some grammarians complain that we copywriters are redundant when we write “free gift,” because all gifts are free. Yet in a split test of “free gift” vs. “gift,” the free gift pulled a greater response.

Power levels were dropped so low that even voice communications were difficult. Removing carbon dioxide from the air was another serious problem. Lithium hydroxide normally did the job but there wasn’t enough of it. The only additional supply they had was in the Command Module, and its canisters were cube-shaped whereas the Lunar Module’s sockets were cylindrical. It looked like the men would suffocate before they made it back. In one of the most inspired brainstorming sessions of all time, engineers on the ground got out all the kit that the crew would have available. They then improvised a ‘mailbox’ that would join the two incompatible connections and draw the air through. The air was becoming more poisonous with every breath as the astronauts followed the meticulous radio instructions to build the Heath Robinson repair. Amazingly, it worked. They would have enough clean air. But they weren’t out of the woods yet. They needed to re-enter the atmosphere in the Command Module, but it had been totally shut down to preserve its power. Would it start up again? Its systems hadn’t been designed to do this. Again, engineers and crew on the ground had to think on their feet if their friends were to live. They invented an entirely new protocol that would power the ship back up with the limited power supply and time available without blowing the system. They also feared that condensation in the unpowered and freezing cold Command Module might damage electrical systems when it was reactivated. It booted up first time. Back to Earth with a splash With Apollo 13 nearing Earth, the crew jettisoned the Service Module and photographed the damage for later analysis. Then they jettisoned the redundant Lunar Module, leaving them sitting tight in the Command Module Odyssey as they plunged into the atmosphere.

If the organization grows in size, higher-ups’ importance will almost invariably be measured by the total number of employees working under them, which, in turn, creates an even more powerful incentive for those on top of the organizational ladder to either hire employees and only then decide what they are going to do with them or—even more often, perhaps—to resist any efforts to eliminate jobs that are found to be redundant.

We analyzed the ten tech companies worth over a billion dollars that went public in 2014 and 2015, and the average company spent a jaw-dropping $0.72 on sales and marketing for every $1.00 of sales during the three-year hypergrowth period before going public. As a matter of fact, one of the companies, Box, spent $1.59 for every $1.00 in sales! You’re probably wondering, how does a company like Box justify spending more money on sales and marketing than they generate in sales? The answer is “customer lifetime value.” Once Box mathematically proved that they could acquire a customer for less than the lifetime value (LTV) of that customer, they raised a war chest of investment capital and didn’t care if they spent more on sales and marketing than they generated in annual sales, because they knew that they would generate a big return in the long run. You probably don’t have access to a massive war chest of investment capital, but that doesn’t mean you are unable to invest more resources on growth. Instead of benchmarking your growth investment against customer lifetime value, benchmark against your bottom-line profits. Here is a list of financial scenarios and corresponding actions: If you desire growth and have a profitable business, operate at a break-even point and reinvest the profit, or a portion of the profit, back into growth. If you are running a break-even or unprofitable business, spend some time going through your expenditures looking for redundancies or unnecessary expenses. If you cannot find any opportunities to save money, prepare yourself to take a temporary pay cut (you can time this around your tax refund or right after your busy period if your business has seasonality). If you are unable to take a temporary pay cut, prepare yourself to work some extra hours (start by batching activities so you can spend a day per week working from home, and use the time you save when not having a work commute to invest in growth). If you are unable to take a temporary pay cut AND unable to work any extra hours, then read the paragraph below.

what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out. And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.

Jennings, who came in second, added a personal note on his answer to the tournament’s final question: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” He later elaborated, “Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the twentieth century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines. ‘Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Grow in your Career by working towards making yourself redundant for the current role!

Bureaucrats complicate. It gives them more work to do. It gives them job security. It means promotions as ever more bureaucrats are added to the Ministry of Redundancy.

In a 2016 book widely publicized in the US, Stern claimed that 58 per cent of all jobs would be automated eventually, driven by the ethos of shareholder value. He told the American media group Bloomberg, ‘It’s not like the fall of the auto and steel industries. That hit just a sector of the country. This will be widespread. People will realize that we don’t have a storm anymore; we have a tsunami.’16 Nevertheless, there are reasons to be sceptical about the prospect of a jobless or even workless future. It is the latest version of the ‘lump of labour fallacy’, the idea that there is only a certain amount of labour and work to be done, so that if more of it can be automated or done by intelligent robots, human workers will be rendered redundant. In any case, very few jobs can be automated in their entirety. The suggestion in a much-cited study17 that nearly half of all US jobs are vulnerable to automation has been challenged by, among others, the OECD, which puts the figure of jobs ‘at risk’ at 9 per cent for industrialized countries.18

With time as the controlling factor we could not afford to wait to be sure of anything,” wrote General Groves.112 Instead, the Manhattan Project rushed ahead based on educated guesses, building two, then three different kinds of uranium separation plants and two different kinds of bombs. Redundancy was their best hedge against failure. If one technology did not work, there would be another as backup.

He insisted on getting "back to the basics of great products, great marketing, and great distribution.”11 At a product strategy session early after his return to Apple, Jobs’s bewilderment and frustration at a plethora of redundant products reached a climax. He drew a two-by-two chart that divided the market into four segments—Consumer and Pro on one axis, Desktop and Portable on the other—and declared that Apple was to make one great product for each quadrant.

But thanks to his sense of smell, he did have a good job. He was employed by the National Intelligence Center to smell murderers and terrorists in letters and other documents. The information revolution was just beginning, and he was very worried: his sense of smell didn't work with screens.