TERMS STARTING WITH
Assessment - 1. proportionate share of a shared expense. Or 2. amount of tax due to a the governmental or other association.
assessment ::: n. --> The act of assessing; the act of determining an amount to be paid; as, an assessment of damages, or of taxes; an assessment of the members of a club.
A valuation of property or profits of business, for the purpose of taxation; such valuation and an adjudging of the proper sum to be levied on the property; as, an assessment of property or an assessment on property.
The specific sum levied or assessed.
TERMS ANYWHERE
Abatement - Complete or partial cancellation of a levy imposed by a governmental unit. Abatements usually apply to tax levies, special assessments, and service charges.
abhidharma. (P. abhidhamma; T. chos mngon pa; C. apidamo/duifa; J. abidatsuma/taiho; K. abidalma/taebop 阿毘達磨/對法). In Sanskrit, abhidharma is a prepositional compound composed of abhi- + dharma. The compound is typically glossed with abhi being interpreted as equivalent to uttama and meaning "highest" or "advanced" DHARMA (viz., doctrines or teachings), or abhi meaning "pertaining to" the dharma. The SARVASTIVADA Sanskrit tradition typically follows the latter etymology, while the THERAVADA PAli tradition prefers the former, as in BUDDHAGHOSA's gloss of the term meaning either "special dharma" or "supplementary dharma." These definitions suggest that abhidharma was conceived as a precise (P. nippariyAya), definitive (PARAMARTHA) assessment of the dharma that was presented in its discursive (P. sappariyAya), conventional (SAMVṚTI) form in the SuTRAS. Where the sutras offered more subjective presentations of the dharma, drawing on worldly parlance, simile, metaphor, and personal anecdote in order to appeal to their specific audiences, the abhidharma provided an objective, impersonal, and highly technical description of the specific characteristics of reality and the causal processes governing production and cessation. There are two divergent theories for the emergence of the abhidharma as a separate genre of Buddhist literature. In one theory, accepted by most Western scholars, the abhidharma is thought to have evolved out of the "matrices" (S. MATṚKA; P. mAtikA), or numerical lists of dharmas, that were used as mnemonic devices for organizing the teachings of the Buddha systematically. Such treatments of dharma are found even in the sutra literature and are probably an inevitable by-product of the oral quality of early Buddhist textual transmission. A second theory, favored by Japanese scholars, is that abhidharma evolved from catechistic discussions (abhidharmakathA) in which a dialogic format was used to clarify problematic issues in doctrine. The dialogic style also appears prominently in the sutras where, for example, the Buddha might give a brief statement of doctrine (uddesa; P. uddesa) whose meaning had to be drawn out through exegesis (NIRDEsA; P. niddesa); indeed, MAHAKATYAYANA, one of the ten major disciples of the Buddha, was noted for his skill in such explications. This same style was prominent enough in the sutras even to be listed as one of the nine or twelve genres of Buddhist literature (specifically, VYAKARAnA; P. veyyAkarana). According to tradition, the Buddha first taught the abhidharma to his mother MAHAMAYA, who had died shortly after his birth and been reborn as a god in TUsITA heaven. He met her in the heaven of the thirty-three (TRAYASTRIMsA), where he expounded the abhidharma to her and the other divinities there, repeating those teachings to sARIPUTRA when he descended each day to go on his alms-round. sAriputra was renowned as a master of the abhidharma. Abhidharma primarily sets forth the training in higher wisdom (ADHIPRAJNAsIKsA) and involves both analytical and synthetic modes of doctrinal exegesis. The body of scholastic literature that developed from this exegetical style was compiled into the ABHIDHARMAPItAKA, one of the three principal sections of the Buddhist canon, or TRIPItAKA, along with sutra and VINAYA, and is concerned primarily with scholastic discussions on epistemology, cosmology, psychology, KARMAN, rebirth, and the constituents of the process of enlightenment and the path (MARGA) to salvation. (In the MAHAYANA tradition, this abhidharmapitaka is sometimes redefined as a broader "treatise basket," or *sASTRAPItAKA.)
An :::algorithm ::: is set of instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a task. One common example of an algorithm is a recipe, which consists of specific instructions for preparing a dish/meal. Every computerized device uses algorithms to perform its functions. BREAKING DOWN 'Algorithm' Financial companies use algorithms in areas such as loan pricing, stock trading, and asset-liability management. For example, algorithmic trading, known as "algo," is used for deciding the timing, pricing, and quantity of stock orders. Algo trading, also known as automated trading or black-box trading, uses a computer program to buy or sell securities at a pace not possible for humans. Since prices of stocks, bonds, and commodities appear in various formats online and in trading data, the process by which an algorithm digests scores of financial data becomes easy. The user of the program simply sets the parameters and gets the desired output when securities meet the trader's criteria. Types of Algos Several types of trading algorithms help investors decide whether to buy or sell. A mean reversion algorithm examines short-term prices over the long-term average price, and if a stock goes much higher than the average, a trader may sell it for a quick profit. Seasonality refers to the practice of traders buying and selling securities based on the time of year when markets typically rise or fall. A sentiment analysis algorithm gauges news about a stock price that could lead to higher volume for a trading period. Algorithm Example The following is an example of an algorithm for trading. A trader creates instructions within his automated account to sell 100 shares of a stock if the 50-day moving average goes below the 200-day moving average. Contrarily, the trader could create instructions to buy 100 shares if the 50-day moving average of a stock rises above the 200-day moving average. Sophisticated algorithms consider hundreds of criteria before buying or selling securities. Computers quickly synthesize the automated account instructions to produce desired results. Without computers, complex trading would be time-consuming and possibly impossible. Algorithms in Computer Science In computer science, a programmer must employ five basic parts of an algorithm to create a successful program. First, he/she describes the problem in mathematical terms before creating the formulas and processes that create results. Next, the programmer inputs the outcome parameters, and then he/she executes the program repeatedly to test its accuracy. The conclusion of the algorithm is the result given after the parameters go through the set of instructions in the program. For financial algorithms, the more complex the program, the more data the software can use to make accurate assessments to buy or sell securities. Programmers test complex algorithms thoroughly to ensure the programs are without errors. Many algorithms can be used for one problem; however, there are some that simplify the process better than others.
Assessment - 1. proportionate share of a shared expense. Or 2. amount of tax due to a the governmental or other association.
Association for Computing ::: (body) (ACM, before 1997 - Association for Computing Machinery) The largest and oldest international scientific and educational computer society in and application of Information Technology. John Mauchly, co-inventor of the ENIAC, was one of ACM's founders.Since its inception ACM has provided its members and the world of computer science a forum for the sharing of knowledge on developments and achievements necessary to the fruitful interchange of ideas.ACM has 90,000 members - educators, researchers, practitioners, managers, and engineers - who drive the Association's major programs and services - publications, special interest groups, chapters, conferences, awards, and special activities.The ACM Press publishes journals (notably CACM), book series, conference proceedings, CD-ROM, hypertext, video, and specialized publications such as curricula recommendations and self-assessment procedures. . (1998-02-24)
Association for Computing "body" (ACM, before 1997 - "Association for Computing Machinery") The largest and oldest international scientific and educational computer society in the industry. Founded in 1947, only a year after the unveiling of {ENIAC}, ACM was established by mathematicians and electrical engineers to advance the science and application of {Information Technology}. {John Mauchly}, co-inventor of the ENIAC, was one of ACM's founders. Since its inception ACM has provided its members and the world of computer science a forum for the sharing of knowledge on developments and achievements necessary to the fruitful interchange of ideas. ACM has 90,000 members - educators, researchers, practitioners, managers, and engineers - who drive the Association's major programs and services - publications, special interest groups, chapters, conferences, awards, and special activities. The ACM Press publishes journals (notably {CACM}), book series, conference proceedings, {CD-ROM}, {hypertext}, {video}, and specialized publications such as curricula recommendations and self-assessment procedures. {(http://info.acm.org/)}. (1998-02-24)
assessment ::: n. --> The act of assessing; the act of determining an amount to be paid; as, an assessment of damages, or of taxes; an assessment of the members of a club.
A valuation of property or profits of business, for the purpose of taxation; such valuation and an adjudging of the proper sum to be levied on the property; as, an assessment of property or an assessment on property.
The specific sum levied or assessed.
Benchmarking (best practices) - The process of searching for new and better procedures by comparing your own procedures to that of the very best. The objective is to measure the key outputs of a business process or function against the best and to analyze the reasons for the performance difference. Benchmarking applies to services and practices as well as to products and is an ongoing systematic process. It entails both quantitative and qualitative measurements that allow both an internal and an external assessment Process benchmarking is the process of assessing the quality of key internal processes by comparing them with those of other firms. In results benchmarking, a firm examines the end product or service of another company, focusing on product/service specifications and performance results.
cessment ::: v. t. --> An assessment or tax.
Ch'ont'ae sagyo ŭi. (C. Tiantai sijiao yi; J. Tendai shikyogi 天台四教儀). In Korean, the "Principle of the Fourfold Teachings of the Tiantai [School]," composed by the Korean monk Ch'egwan (d. 970); an influential primer of TIANTAI ZONG (K. Chont'ae chong) doctrine. The loss of the texts of the Tiantai tradition in China after the chaos that accompanied the fall of the Tang dynasty prompted the king of the Wuyue kingdom to seek copies of them elsewhere in East Asia. King Kwangjong (r. 950-975) of the Koryo dynasty responded to the Wuyue king's search by sending the monk Ch'egwan to China in 961. In order to summarize the major teachings of the Tiantai school, Ch'egwan wrote this one-roll abstract of TIANTAI ZHIYI's Sijiao yi, which also draws on other of Zhiyi's writings, including his FAHUA XUANYI. Ch'egwan's text is especially known for its summary of Zhiyi's doctrinal classification schema (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI) on the different (chronological) stages of the Buddha's teaching career and the varying methods he used in preaching to his audiences; these are called the "five periods and eight teachings" (WUSHI BAJIAO). The five periods correspond to what the Tiantai school considered to be the five major chronological stages in the Buddha's teaching career, each of which is exemplified by a specific scripture or type of scripture: (1) HUAYAN (AVATAMSAKASuTRA), (2) AGAMA, (3) VAIPULYA, (4) PRAJNAPARAMITA, and (5) SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA and MAHAPARINIRVAnASuTRA. The different target audiences of the Buddha's message lead to four differing varieties of content in these teachings (huafa): (1) the PItAKA teachings, which were targeted at the two-vehicle adherents (ER SHENG) of disciples (sRAVAKA) and solitary buddhas (PRATYEKABUDDHA); (2) the common teachings, which were intended for both two-vehicle adherents and neophyte bodhisattvas of the MAHAYANA; (3) the distinct teachings, which targeted only bodhisattvas; (4) the perfect or consummate teachings (YUANJIAO), which offered advanced bodhisattvas an unvarnished assessment of Buddhist truths. In speaking to these audiences, which differed dramatically in their capacity to understand his message, the Buddha is said also to have employed four principal techniques of conversion (huayi), or means of conveying his message: sudden, gradual, secret, and indeterminate. Ch'egwan's text played a crucial role in the revitalization of the Tiantai tradition in China and has remained widely studied since. The Ch'ont'ae sagyo ŭi was also influential in Japan, where it was repeatedly republished. Numerous commentaries on this text have also been written in China, Korea, and Japan.
chout ::: n. --> An assessment equal to a fourth part of the revenue.
clinical psychology: focuses on the assessment and treatment of abnormal or maladaptive behaviour.
closed text examination: An examination where the texts studied are not allowed to be taken in or used during the assessment.
club ::: n. --> A heavy staff of wood, usually tapering, and wielded the hand; a weapon; a cudgel.
Any card of the suit of cards having a figure like the trefoil or clover leaf. (pl.) The suit of cards having such figure.
An association of persons for the promotion of some common object, as literature, science, politics, good fellowship, etc.; esp. an association supported by equal assessments or contributions of the members.
commentary: A term which is often used in examinations or assessments. A commentary is a piece of writing where the candidate gives a close reading of a text, taking into account aspects of style, view point and content.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility "body" (CPSR) A non-profit organisation whose mission is to provide the public and policymakers with realistic assessments of the power, promise and problems of {Information Technology} and the effects of computers on society. CPSR was founded in the USA in 1981 but has spread to many other countries. CPSR is supported by its membership. CPSR sponsors conferences such as their Annual Meeting, Directions and Implications in Advanced Computing (DIAC), the Participatory Design Conference (PDC) and the Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) conference. {CPSR Home (http://cpsr.org/)}. (2012-11-04)
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility ::: (CPSR) A non-profit organisation whose mission is to provide the public and policymakers with realistic assessments of the power, promise and problems of Computing (DIAC), the Participatory Design Conference (PDC) and the Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) conference. . (1994-11-30)
critiqued ::: judged critically, made a critical assessment of or comment on (an action, person, etc.).
danegelt ::: n. --> An annual tax formerly laid on the English nation to buy off the ravages of Danish invaders, or to maintain forces to oppose them. It afterward became a permanent tax, raised by an assessment, at first of one shilling, afterward of two shillings, upon every hide of land throughout the realm.
Dose-response Assessment ::: The process of characterizing the relation between the dose of an agent administered or received and the incidence of an adverse health effect in exposed populations and estimating the incidence of the effect as a function of human exposure to the agent.
Due diligence – A qualitative assessment of management’s character and capability. Comprehensive due diligence may also include an examination of the books and records, asset appraisals, reviews of the company's other debt obligations, legal and accounting affairs, internal controls, planned capital expenditures, and other matters that bear on the company's future success and profitability. Due diligence is a legal requirement before public offerings.
Ecological Risk Assessment::: The application of a formal framework, analytical process, or model to estimate the effects of human action(s) on a natural resource and to interpret the significance of those effects in light of the uncertainties identified in each component of the assessment process. Such analysis includes initial hazard identification, exposure and dose response assessments, and risk characterization.
EMBAM (Environmental Management Benefit Assessment Matrix)::: A management tool to evaluate and categorize EM activities based on the risks associated with the activities of each project.
Endangerment Assessment::: A study to determine the nature and extent of contamination at a site on the National Priorities List and the risks posed to public health or the environment. EPA or the state conducts the study when a legal action is to be taken to direct potentially responsible parties to clean up a site or pay for it. An endangerment assessment supplements a remedial investigation.
Environmental Assessment ::: An environmental analysis prepared pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act to determine whether a federal action would significantly affect the environment and thus require a more detailed environmental impact statement.
Environmental Audit::: An independent assessment of the current status of a party's compliance with applicable environmental requirements or of a party's environmental compliance policies, practices, and controls.
Environmental Impact Statement ::: A document required of Federal agencies by the National Environmental Policy Act for major projects or legislative proposals. They provide information for decision makers on the positive and negative effects of the undertaking, and list alternatives to the proposed action, including taking no action. For example, an environmental impact assessment report, prepared by an applicant for an NPDES permit to discharge as a new source, identifies and evaluates the environmental impacts of the applicant's proposed source and feasible alternatives.
Exposure Assessment::: The process of measuring or estimating the intensity, frequency, and duration of human exposures to an agent currently present in the environment or of estimating hypothetical exposures that might arise from the release of new chemicals into the environment.
five-number summary: Also known as a five-point summary. A conventional group of parameters shown in box-and-whisker plots in summary statistics. They can of course be shown in other ways or with additional parameters. The five numbers are: Q_0 the minimum, Q_1 the lower quartile, Q_2 the median, Q_3 the upper quartile and Q_4 the maximum. The provision of these summaries allow for a quick assessment or comparison of average (in this case, median), dispersion as well as skewness of the data.
fuzzy set ::: In classical set theory, the membership of elements in a set is assessed in binary terms according to a bivalent condition — an element either belongs or does not belong to the set. By contrast, fuzzy set theory permits the gradual assessment of the membership of elements in a set; this is described with the aid of a membership function valued in the real unit interval [0, 1]. Fuzzy sets generalize classical sets, since the indicator functions (aka characteristic functions) of classical sets are special cases of the membership functions of fuzzy sets, if the latter only take values 0 or 1.[180] In fuzzy set theory, classical bivalent sets are usually called crisp sets. The fuzzy set theory can be used in a wide range of domains in which information is incomplete or imprecise, such as bioinformatics.[181]
Hazard Assessment ::: An analysis and evaluation of the physical, chemical and biological properties of the hazard.
Health Assessment ::: An evaluation of available data on existing or potential risks to human health posed by a Superfund site. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is required to perform such an assessment at every site on the National Priorities List.
Health Effect Assessment ::: The component of risk assessment which determines the probability of a health effect given a particular level or range of exposure to a hazard.
Huayan wujiao. (J. Kegon no gokyo; K. Hwaom ogyo 華嚴五教). In Chinese, "Huayan's five classifications of the teachings." The HUAYAN ZONG recognizes two different versions of this doctrinal-classification schema, which ranks different strands of Buddhist teachings. The best-known version was outlined by DUSHUN and FAZANG: (1) The HĪNAYĀNA teachings (xiaojiao; cf. XIAOSHENG JIAO), also known as the srāvakayāna teaching (shengwenjiao), was pejoratively referred to as "teachings befitting the [spiritually] obtuse" (yufa). The ĀGAMAs and the ABHIDHARMAs were relegated to this class, which supposedly dealt primarily with theories of elements (DHĀTU) and more basic concepts such as dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA). (2) The "elementary teaching [of Mahāyāna]" ([Dasheng] SHIJIAO). Within this category, two additional subgroups were differentiated. The first was the "initial teaching pertaining to emptiness" (kong shijiao), which encompassed the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ literature and exegetical traditions such as MADHYAMAKA. This class of teachings was characterized by an emphasis (or, in Huayan's polemical assessment, an overemphasis) on the doctrine of emptiness (suNYATĀ). The second subgroup, the "initial teaching pertaining to phenomena" (xiang shijiao), broaches the dynamic and phenomenal aspects of reality and did not confine itself to the theme of emptiness. YOGĀCĀRA and its traditional affiliate sutras and commentaries were classified under this subgroup. Together, these two subgroups were deemed the provisional teachings (quanjiao) within the MAHĀYĀNA tradition. (3) The "advanced [Mahāyāna] teachings" ([Dasheng] ZHONGJIAO) focused on the way true suchness (ZHENRU; S. TATHATĀ) was innately immaculate but could be activated in response to myriad conditions. The DASHENG QIXIN LUN ("Awakening of Faith"), sRĪMĀLĀDEVĪSIMHANĀDASuTRA, and LAnKĀVATĀRASuTRA are examples of texts belonging to this doctrinal category. The treatment in these texts of the one mind (YIXIN) and TATHĀGATAGARBHA thought was considered a more definitive rendition of the MAHĀYĀNA teachings than were the elementary teachings (shijiao). (4) The "sudden teachings" (DUNJIAO), which includes texts like the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, was ranked as a unique category of subitist teachings befitting people of keen spiritual faculties (TĪKsnENDRIYA), and therefore bypasses traditional, systematic approaches to enlightenment. The CHAN ZONG's touted soteriological methods involving sudden enlightenment (DUNWU) and its rejection of reliance on written texts led some Huayan teachers to relegate that school to this advanced, but still inferior, category of the teachings. Chan was thus superseded by, (5) the "perfect teachings" or "consummate teachings" (YUANJIAO). This supposedly most comprehensive and definitive strand of Buddhist teaching was reserved for the Huayan school and especially its definitive scripture, the AVATAMSAKASuTRA. ¶ The second version of five classifications was made by GUIFENG ZONGMI (780-841) in his YUANREN LUN: (1) The "teachings pertaining to the human and heavenly realms" (RENTIAN JIAO) encompassed "mundane" (LAUKIKA) practices, such as the observation of the five precepts (PANCAsĪLA) and the ten wholesome ways of action (KUsALA-KARMAPATHA); this classification was named because of its believed efficacy to lead practitioners to higher realms of rebirth. (2) The "HĪNAYĀNA teachings" (XIAOSHENG JIAO), which were similar to the previous "xiaojiao." (3) The "dharma-characteristics teachings of MAHĀYĀNA" (Dasheng faxiang jiao), which was analogous to the aforementioned "elementary teaching pertaining to phenomena" (xiang shijiao) in the preceding classification scheme. (4) The "characteristics-negating teachings of MAHĀYĀNA" (Dasheng poxiang jiao) was analogous to the preceding "elementary teaching pertaining to emptiness." (5) The "nature-revealing teaching of the one vehicle" (yisheng xiangxing jiao) was equivalent to the last three categories Fazang's system combined together. See also HUAYAN WUJIAO ZHANG.
Interview ::: A subjective personality and mental health assessment typically consisting of questions and answers.
kammatthāna. In Pāli, lit. "working ground," viz., "meditative topic"; a topic or object of meditation (BHĀVANĀ) used for training the mind and cultivating mental concentration (SAMĀDHI). The term originally referred to an occupation or vocation, such as farmer, merchant, or mendicant, but was adopted as a technical term to refer generically to various types of meditative exercises. The VISUDDHIMAGGA lists forty topics used for this purpose. First are ten "visualization devices" (KASInA)-devices that are constructed from the elements earth, water, fire, and air; the colors blue, yellow, red, and white, and light and space-to develop concentration. Kasina exercises can produce all four of the "meditative absorptions" (JHĀNA; DHYĀNA) associated with the realm of subtle materiality. Next are ten "loathsome topics" (asubha; see S. AsUBHABHĀVANĀ), such as the decaying of a corpse, which can lead only to the first meditative absorption (dhyāna). These are followed by ten "recollections" (P. anussati; S. ANUSMṚTI): viz., of (1) the Buddha, (2) the dhamma (DHARMA), (3) the sangha (SAMGHA), (4) morality, (5) generosity, (6) the divinities, (7) death, (8) the body, (9) the inbreath and outbreath (P. ānāpānasati, S. ĀNĀPĀNASMṚTI), and (10) peace. Of these, recollection or mindfulness (P. sati; S. SMṚTI) of the inbreath and outbreath can produce all four meditative absorptions, while recollection of the body can produce the first absorption; the remaining recollections only lead to "access concentration" (UPACĀRASAMĀDHI), which immediately precedes but does not reach the level of the first absorption. Next are four "immaterial spheres" (arupāyatana), viz., the "sphere of infinite space" (ākāsānaNcāyatana, S. ĀKĀsĀNANTYĀYATANA); of "infinite consciousness" (viNNānaNcāyatana, S. VIJNĀNĀNANTYĀYATANA); of "nothingness" (ākiNcaNNāyatana, S. ĀKINCANYĀYATANA); and of "neither perception nor nonperception" (nevasaNNānāsaNNāyatana, S. NAIVASAMJNĀNĀSAMJNĀYATANA). Meditation on these objects involves the increasing refinement of the fourth absorption and leads to the acquisition of the "immaterial attainments" (ARuPASAMĀPATTI), also called "immaterial absorptions" (P. arupāvacarajhāna; S. ĀRuPYĀVACARADHYĀNA, see DHYĀNA, SAMĀPATTI). Four positive affective states or "divine abidings" (BRAHMAVIHĀRA; [alt. P. appamaNNa]; S. APRAMĀnA), are loving-kindness (mettā; MAITRĪ), compassion (KARUnĀ), altruistic or empathetic joy (MUDITĀ), and equanimity or impartiality (upekkhā; UPEKsĀ). Of these, loving-kindness, compassion, and altruistic joy can produce only the first three meditative absorptions, but equanimity can produce all four. There is one perception of the loathsomeness of food (āhāre patikkulasaNNā) and one analysis of the four elements (catudhātu vavatthāna), both of which can produce access concentration. Certain of these topics were said to be better suited to specific character types, such as the loathsome topics to persons with strong tendencies toward lust or the perception of the loathsomeness of food for gluttons; others, such as the meditation on the in- and outbreaths, were universally suitable to all character types. The Buddha was said to have had the ability to assess his disciples' character types and determine which topics of meditation would best suit them; as later generations lost this assessment ability, the number of kammatthānas in regular use dropped dramatically, with mindfulness of breathing being by far the most popular topic.
Nāgārjuna. (T. Klu sgrub; C. Longshu; J. Ryuju; K. Yongsu 龍樹). Indian Buddhist philosopher traditionally regarded as the founder of the MADHYAMAKA [alt. Mādhyamika] school of MAHĀYĀNA Buddhist philosophy. Very little can be said concerning his life; scholars generally place him in South India during the second century CE. Traditional accounts state that he lived four hundred years after the Buddha's PARINIRVĀnA. Some traditional biographies also state that he lived for six hundred years, apparently attempting to identify him with a later Nāgārjuna known for his tantric writings. Two of the works attributed to Nāgārjuna, the RATNĀVALĪ and the SUHṚLLEKHA, are verses of advice to a king, suggesting that he may have achieved some fame during his lifetime. His birth is "prophesied" in a number of works, including the LAnKĀVATĀRASuTRA. Other sources indicate that he also served as abbot of a monastery. He appears to have been the teacher of ĀRYADEVA, and his works served as the subject of numerous commentaries in India, East Asia, and Tibet. Although Nāgārjuna is best known in the West for his writings on emptiness (suNYATĀ), especially as set forth in his most famous work, the "Verses on the Middle Way" (MuLAMADHYAMAKAKĀRIKĀ, also known as the MADHYAMAKAsĀSTRA), Nāgārjuna was the author of a number of works (even when questions of attribution are taken into account) on a range of topics, and it is through a broad assessment of these works that an understanding of his thought is best gained. He wrote as a Buddhist monk and as a proponent of the Mahāyāna; in several of his works he defends the Mahāyāna sutras as being BUDDHAVACANA. He compiled an anthology of passages from sixty-eight sutras entitled the "Compendium of Sutras" (SuTRASAMUCCAYA), the majority of which are Mahāyāna sutras; this work provides a useful index for scholars in determining which sutras were extant during his lifetime. Among the Mahāyāna sutras, Nāgārjuna is particularly associated with the "perfection of wisdom" (PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ) corpus. According to legend, Nāgārjuna retrieved from the Dragon King's palace at the bottom of the sea the "Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines" (sATASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA), which the Buddha had entrusted to the undersea king of the NĀGAs for safekeeping. He also composed hymns of praise to the Buddha, such as the CATUḤSTAVA, and expositions of Buddhist ethical practice, such as the Ratnāvalī. (Later exegetes classify his works into a YUKTIKĀYA, or "logical corpus," and a STAVAKĀYA, or "devotional corpus.") Nāgārjuna's works are addressed to a variety of audiences. His philosophical texts are sometimes directed against logicians of non-Buddhist schools, but most often offer a critique of the doctrines and assumptions of Buddhist ABHIDHARMA schools, especially the SARVĀSTIVĀDA. Other works are more general expositions of Buddhist practice, directed sometimes to monastic audiences, sometimes to lay audiences. An overriding theme in his works is the bodhisattva's path to buddhahood, and the merit (PUnYA) and wisdom (PRAJNĀ) that the bodhisattva must accumulate over the course of that path in order to achieve enlightenment. By wisdom here, he means the perfection of wisdom (prajNāpāramitā), declared in the sutras to be the knowledge of emptiness (suNYATĀ). Nāgārjuna is credited with rendering the poetic and sometimes paradoxical declarations concerning emptiness that appear in these and other Mahāyāna sutras into a coherent philosophical system. In his first sermon, the DHARMACAKRAPRAVARTANASuTRA, the Buddha had prescribed a "middle way" between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification. Nāgārjuna, citing an early sutra, spoke of a middle way between the extremes of existence and nonexistence, sometimes also referred to as the middle way between the extremes of permanence (sĀsVATĀNTA) and annihilation (UCCHEDĀNTA). For Nāgārjuna, the ignorance (AVIDYĀ) that is the source of all suffering is the belief in SVABHĀVA, a term that literally means "own being" and has been variously rendered as "intrinsic existence" and "self-nature." This belief is the mistaken view that things exist autonomously, independently, and permanently; to hold this belief is to fall into the extreme of permanence. It is equally mistaken, however, to hold that nothing exists; this is the extreme of annihilation. Emptiness, which for Nāgārjuna is the true nature of reality, is not the absence of existence, but the absence of self-existence, viz., the absence of svabhāva. Nāgārjuna devotes his Mulamadhyamakakārikā to a thoroughgoing analysis of a wide range of topics (in twenty-seven chapters and 448 verses), including the Buddha, the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS, and NIRVĀnA, to demonstrate that each lacks the autonomy and independence that are mistakenly ascribed to it. His approach generally is to consider the various ways in which a given entity could exist, and then demonstrate that none of these is tenable because of the absurdities that would be entailed thereby, a form of reasoning often described in Western writings as reductio ad absurdum. In the case of something that is regarded to be the effect of a cause, he shows that the effect cannot be produced from itself (because an effect is the product of a cause), from something other than itself (because there must be a link between cause and effect), from something that is both the same as and different from itself (because the former two options are not possible), or from something that is neither the same as nor different from itself (because no such thing exists). This, in his view, is what is meant in the perfection of wisdom sutras when they state that all phenomena are "unproduced" (ANUTPĀDA). The purpose of such an analysis is to destroy misconceptions (VIKALPA) and encourage the abandonment of all views (DṚstI). Nāgārjuna defined emptiness in terms of the doctrine of PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA, or "dependent origination," understood in its more generic sense as the fact that things are not self-arisen, but are produced in dependence on causes and conditions. This definition allows Nāgārjuna to avoid the claim of nihilism, which he addresses directly in his writings and which his followers would confront over the centuries. Nāgārjuna employs the doctrine of the two truths (SATYADVAYA) of ultimate truth (PARAMĀRTHASATYA) and conventional truth (SAMVṚTISATYA), explaining that everything that exists is ultimately empty of any intrinsic nature but does exist conventionally. The conventional is the necessary means for understanding the ultimate, and the ultimate makes the conventional possible. As Nāgārjuna wrote, "For whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible."
needs assessment "systems" A systematic process to acquire an accurate, thorough picture of a system's strengths and weaknesses, in order to improve it and meet existing and future challenges. (2007-11-24)
No Further Remedial Action Planned ::: Determination made by EPA following a preliminary assessment that a site does not pose a significant risk and so requires no further activity under CERCLA.
NRDA (Natural Resource Damage Assessment)::: Restores natural resources by returning ecosystems to full function and compensating the public for injuries to its resources. This is part of the natural resource management role of Department of Natural Resource trustees.
Preliminary Assessment::: The process of collecting and reviewing available information about a known or suspected waste site or release.
Program Evaluation and Review Technique "programming" (PERT) A method used to size a software product and calculate the Standard Deviation (SD) for risk assessment. The PERT equation (beta distribution) estimates the Equivalent {Delivered Source Instructions} (EDSIs) and the SD based on the analyst's estimates of the lowest possible size, the most likely size, and the highest possible size of each computer program component (CPC). (1996-05-29)
Program Evaluation and Review Technique ::: (programming) (PERT) A method used to size a software product and calculate the Standard Deviation (SD) for risk assessment. The PERT equation the most likely size, and the highest possible size of each computer program component (CPC). (1996-05-29)
projective test: a type of personality assessment during which an individual is asked to interpret an ambiguous, abstract stimulus and an individuals response will reveal unconscious and hidden feelings, motives and conflicts.
quality control "testing" The assessment of product compliance with stated requirements. Quality control should be independent from production. (2001-05-20)
quality control ::: (testing) The assessment of product compliance with stated requirements. Quality control should be independent from production.(2001-05-20)
reassessment ::: n. --> A renewed or second assessment.
repartimiento ::: n. --> A partition or distribution, especially of slaves; also, an assessment of taxes.
Risk Analysis::: A detailed examination including risk assessment, risk evaluation, and risk management alternatives, performed to understand the nature of unwanted, negative consequences to human life, health, property, or the environment; an analytical process to provide information regarding undesirable events; the process of quantification of the probabilities and expected consequences for identified risks.
Risk Assessment ::: The process of establishing information regarding acceptable levels of a risk and/or levels of risk for an individual, group, society, or the environment.
Risk_assessment ::: is a general term used across many industries to determine the likelihood of loss on an asset, loan, or investment. Assessing risk is essential for determining the worthwhile of an investment and the best process(es) to mitigate risk, and it presents the upside reward compared to the risk profile. It also determines the rate of return necessary to make a particular investment succeed.
Risk Characterization::: This last step in the risk assessment process characterizes the potential for adverse health effects and evaluates the uncertainty involved.
Risk Evaluation ::: A component of risk assessment in which judgments are made about the significance and acceptability of risk.
Risk_tolerance ::: is the degree of variability in investment returns that an investor is willing to withstand. Risk tolerance is an important component in investing. You should have a realistic understanding of your ability and willingness to stomach large swings in the value of your investments; if you take on too much risk, you might panic and sell at the wrong time. BREAKING DOWN 'Risk Tolerance' Risk tolerance assessments for investors abound, including risk-related surveys or questionnaires. As an investor, you may also want to review historical worst-case returns for different asset classes to get an idea of how much money you would feel comfortable losing if your investments have a bad year or bad series of years. Other factors affecting risk tolerance are the time horizon you have to invest, your future earning capacity, and the presence of other assets such as a home, pension, Social Security or an inheritance. In general, you can take greater risk with investable assets when you have other, more stable sources of funds available. Aggressive Risk Tolerance Aggressive investors tend to be market-savvy. A deep understanding of securities and their propensities allows such individuals and institutional investors to purchase highly volatile instruments, such as small company stocks that can plummet to zero or options contracts that can expire worthless. While maintaining a base of riskless securities, aggressive investors reach for maximum returns with maximum risk.
sess ::: v. t. --> To lay a tax upon; to assess. ::: n. --> A tax; an assessment. See Cess.
Site Assessment Program ::: A means of evaluating hazardous waste sites through preliminary assessments and site inspections to develop a Hazard Ranking System score.
Site Inspection ::: The collection of information from a Superfund site to determine the extent and severity of hazards posed by the site. It follows and is more extensive than a preliminary assessment. The purpose is to gather information necessary to score the site, using the Hazard Ranking System, and to determine if it presents an immediate threat requiring prompt removal.
subjective: a subjective assessment is one that is based on criteria that exist only or principally in the assessor. Two subjective assessors assessing the same item might differ widely in their assessment.
taxable ::: a. --> Capable of being taxed; liable by law to the assessment of taxes; as, taxable estate; taxable commodities.
That may be legally charged by a court against the plaintiff of defendant in a suit; as, taxable costs.
TickIT ::: A software industry quality assessment scheme.
TickIT A software industry quality assessment scheme.
Tolerable - 1. In auditing, degree of acceptable misstatement in substantive testing without materially misstating the financial statements. A tolerable rate is the maximum deviation rate in tests of controls that is acceptable by the auditor in his or her assessment of control risk. Or 2. In cost accounting, acceptable variance between actual and standard cost or revenue.
Toxicity Assessment ::: Characterization of the toxicological properties and effects of a chemical, with special emphasis on establishment of dose response characteristics.
KEYS (10k)
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
18 Anonymous
7 Ed Catmull
5 Walter Isaacson
5 Noam Chomsky
5 Daniel Kahneman
4 Rolf Dobelli
4 J R Ward
4 Jocko Willink
4 Jen Hatmaker
4 Ernest Sosa
4 Becca Fitzpatrick
4 Barack Obama
4 Amartya Sen
3 Wayne W Dyer
3 Suzanne Bates
3 Steven D Levitt
3 Neale Donald Walsch
3 Naomi Oreskes
3 Marcus Aurelius
3 Cris Tovani
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:According to my assessment, even if you have many more troops than others, how can that help you to victory? ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 2:I believe photography is a tool to express our positive assessment of the world. A tool to acquire ultimate happiness and belief. ~ amsel-adams, @wisdomtrove 3:Here's a simple way you can engage your intuition. When you are about to say something and you're not sure if you want to say it, ask yourself, "What is my motivation?" When you check your motivation you engage non-physical guidance and you will not be alone in you assessment. ~ gary-zukav, @wisdomtrove 4:Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove 5:Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Medical Center for assessment and ~ Michael Connelly, #NFDB
2:Hope is a stance, not an assessment. ~ Frances Moore Lappe, #NFDB
3:Independence is a very subjective assessment. ~ P Chidambaram, #NFDB
4:In fact, they’re trained in risk assessment ~ Yrsa Sigur ard ttir, #NFDB
5:I am never guided by a possible assessment of my work. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
6:1. Take the assessment at HighPerformanceIndicator.com ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
7:Our initial assessment is that they will all die. ~ Mohammed Saeed al Sahaf, #NFDB
8:Routines without ongoing assessment lead to stagnation and mediocrity. ~ T D Jakes, #NFDB
9:Assessment is today's means of modifying tomorrow's instruction. ~ Carol Ann Tomlinson, #NFDB
10:with an alteration in the mode of assessment, which I thought not for ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
11:I made my own assessment of my life, and I began to live it. That was freedom. ~ Fernando Flores, #NFDB
12:On assessment: measure what you value instead of valuing only what you can measure. ~ Andy Hargreaves, #NFDB
13:feel myself light up, like I do every time I hear an outside assessment of how I seem. ~ Kayla Rae Whitaker, #NFDB
14:Don’t be too quick in your assessment of God’s gifts to you. Thank him. Moment by moment. Day by day. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
15:External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
16:important outcomes from taking the StandOut assessment is simply that you remember your results. ~ Marcus Buckingham, #NFDB
17:Only in Washington would death be considered a taxable event. [a cynical but perhaps fair assessment] ~ Mike Ferguson, #NFDB
18:According to my assessment, even if you have many more troops than others, how can that help you to victory? ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
19:Was he some test from the Ministry of Pain? Some awful assessment, and if so, had she passed or failed? ~ Ian McDonald, #NFDB
20:Any assessment of where we stand in relationship to Him tells us that we do not stand at all. We kneel. ~ Neal A Maxwell, #NFDB
21:No matter how much you have already invested, only your assessment of the future costs and benefits counts. ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB
22:Let he who would move the world, first complete an environmental impact assessment and a 90-day public comment period. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
23:People usually said to me, "Mr. Aubrey Grant, what a strange life you live."
Which was a fairly accurate assessment. ~ C S Poe,#NFDB
24:Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing. ~ Wynton Marsalis, #NFDB
25:Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
26:Greetings. My name is Don Tillman and I am a suspected paedophile. I wish to put myself on standby for an assessment. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB
27:When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight. ~ Steven D Levitt, #NFDB
28:I’m not sure,” Atkinson replied. “Maybe six months.” It was a wildly optimistic assessment, but also a motivating one. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
29:whatever beauty she thought she might have possessed she realized had only been through her husband's assessment of her ~ Molly Ringwald, #NFDB
30:If [Donald] Trump drags down a bunch of Senate Republicans, the post-election GOP assessment will be much more pessimistic. ~ Mara Liasson, #NFDB
31:think of the blue flame as a convergence of mission and passion founded on a realistic self-assessment of your abilities. ~ Keith Ferrazzi, #NFDB
32:Here’s some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you’ve made before you look askance at somebody else’s. ~ Kathleen Rooney, #NFDB
33:Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak. ~ Ernest Gellner, #NFDB
34:Last but not least, knowledge mapping's contextualizing capability facilitates community-wide consensual innovation assessment. ~ James Burke, #NFDB
35:I believe photography is a tool to express our positive assessment of the world. A tool to acquire ultimate happiness and belief. ~ Ansel Adams, #NFDB
36:You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
37:Starting at the bottom is not about humiliation. It's about humility—a realistic assessment of where you are in the learning curve. ~ Maria Shriver, #NFDB
38:My life is now a constant assessment of whether what's happening in real life is more entertaining than what's happening on my phone. ~ Damien Fahey, #NFDB
39:The thesis that risk assessment itself is inherently risky is nowhere better borne out than in the area of high-consequence risks. ~ Anthony Giddens, #NFDB
40:Honestly admitting what you lost and not trying to rationalize it or push it off is an important step in self-assessment and mindfulness. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
41:(Innocent Assessment: They were just buying lunch for the crew working on her house. Not-So-Innocent Assessment: They're totally doing it.) ~ Kieran Scott, #NFDB
42:One of the benefits of being divorced is that you no longer need to listen to your ex's assessment of the appropriateness of your actions. ~ Amy Dickinson, #NFDB
43:An assessment at one point in time has little value for understanding someone’s ability, let alone their potential to succeed in the future. ~ Carol S Dweck, #NFDB
44:Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
45:Funnel all potentially meaningful inputs through minimal channels, directed to you for easily accessed review and assessment about their nature. ~ David Allen, #NFDB
46:The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
47:Balancing hopes, desires and an appreciating of the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations: that is the art of choosing. ~ Sheena Iyengar, #NFDB
48:The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote. The ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
49:You want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cellphones or the Internet? ~ Samuel Alito, #NFDB
50:Another study of adults found the same thing: the more people used Facebook, the lower their mental health and life satisfaction at the next assessment. ~ Jean M Twenge, #NFDB
51:His realistic assessment, acknowledgment of failure, and ownership of the problem were key to developing a plan to improve performance and ultimately win. ~ Jocko Willink, #NFDB
52:[Antonio] Gramsci's words and actions explain their assessment, though I think we should refrain from using the term "model intellectual" for him or others. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
53:The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. ~ Ann Patchett, #NFDB
54:What we did, what every president since Washington has done, was provide a measured, appropriate response, in direct relation to a realistic threat assessment. ~ Max Brooks, #NFDB
55:Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data. A ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
56:...there is a predator-like mental scan that black women have to do before speaking, and even after we've done risk assessment, things can still go astray. ~ Phoebe Robinson, #NFDB
57:NOMINATE, v. To designate for the heaviest political assessment. To put forward a suitable person to incur the mudgobbling and deadcatting of the opposition. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
58:Britain’s post-War assessment, shared by the Labour Party, that a separated Pakistan would benefit the Western world in the context of the Middle East’s oil, ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
59:UCLA's economics department ranked among the top dozen in the country. I was in over my head, and Professor Hirschleifer's assessment turned out to correct. ~ Walter E Williams, #NFDB
60:Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That of which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak. ~ Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (1959), p. 265., #NFDB
61:We are alive and we resonate with idea of life elsewhere, but only careful accumulation and assessment of the evidence can tell us whether a given world is inhabited. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
62:According to the Office of Technology Assessment, 3 Minuteman missiles and 7 Poseidon missiles could destroy 73 percent of oil-refining capacity in the Soviet Union. ~ James Fallows, #NFDB
63:For the record, I’d like to state that I think that I disagree with your assessment of the situation.” “Noted. But when it comes to who kisses me, I get the deciding vote. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
64:Think of what happened after 9/11, the minute before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq, and so the war drums beat. ~ Ron Paul, #NFDB
65:To reduce the demands of God’s law is to do violence to the holiness of God. To inflate one’s own self-assessment to the point of self-delusion is an extreme form of pride. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
66:What becomes of this emotion we call envy when it is uncoupled from fear and malice? Does it remain a sin? Or is it simply an honest assessment of the human condition? ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
67:From that day on, I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light, a process that would require what might seem like an uncommon commitment to self-assessment. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
68:One-time rival and subsequent usurper Secretary of State Seward finally settled into an assessment of Lincoln that, "His confidence and compassion increase every day. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin, #NFDB
69:Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of self-assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately, reinforces humility. Breaking them is part of the cycle. ~ Eric Zorn, #NFDB
70:Thinking rationally is often different from "positive thinking," in that it is a realistic assessment of the situation, with a view towards rectifying the problem if possible. ~ Albert Ellis, #NFDB
71:He’s a lovely guy, but there’s no spark between us whatsoever. It just goes to show, that even with all their fancy assessment tools, the government can’t legislate for chemistry. ~ Siobhan Davis, #NFDB
72:I think kids should have a mentor and a role model, but that they shouldn't take one person's opinion to be what we call final assessment or judgment about how life is supposed to be. ~ Sean Paul, #NFDB
73:In the process of developing an accurate assessment of who you actually are, you need to appreciate the disparity between how you appear to your own mind and how you indeed exist. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
74:People don't actually, a lot of times, know the game behind the game. If people think that they do, it's a little bit of a naïve assessment of how the [writing] industry works. ~ Mandy Stadtmiller, #NFDB
75:Bismarck urged that foreign policy had to be based not on sentiment but on an assessment of strength,” Kissinger wrote. That would also become one of Kissinger’s guiding principles. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
76:Most people are terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events. ~ Steven D Levitt, #NFDB
77:My label in Toronto was Stand Pat and I think that was a fair assessment. I tried to be patient, but if a trade came along - big or small - that I thought should be made, I would make it. ~ Pat Gillick, #NFDB
78:To stop at moral judgement on whether caste was good or evil is insufficient, as the assessment has to go much further and examine why this form of discrimination/organization was chosen. ~ Romila Thapar, #NFDB
79:Rational decision making requires you to forget about the costs incurred to date. No matter how much you have already invested, only your assessment of the future costs and benefits counts. ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB
80:There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so. ~ Mary Daly, #NFDB
81:By positional play a master tries to prove and exploit true values, whereas by combinations he seeks to refute false values ... A combination produces an unexpected re-assessment of values. ~ Emanuel Lasker, #NFDB
82:Thank you, Dr. Phil, for that fine psychological assessment," I snapped and motioned my chin to Disco. "Why don't you and Oprah here go take a long walk off a short plank and do the world a favor? ~ J A Saare, #NFDB
83:But few black parents had any substantial contact with the school. Rist doubts their assessment would have been so positive had they been "really aware" of what was happening to their children. ~ Derrick A Bell, #NFDB
84:In Connecticut, my understanding, although I haven't seen the actual litigation, is that they want to measure every other year and not provide annual assessment as is required in the statute. ~ Margaret Spellings, #NFDB
85:If the agent aims to make the attempt if and only if it would be apt, then a distinctive element of risk assessment becomes relevant: How probably would the agent succeed in attempting that fuller end? ~ Ernest Sosa, #NFDB
86:The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system. ~ Rachel Maddow, #NFDB
87:External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now. If the problem is something in your own character, who’s stopping you from setting your mind straight? ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
88:Our assessment of reading may begin with standardized test scores, but in the end we must measure a child’s reading ability by the amount of laughter exhaled and tears shed as the written word is devoured. ~ Rafe Esquith, #NFDB
89:The environmental assessment should give us the answers to all the issues that have been raised: potential lead migration, endangered species, noise abatement and proper disposal of shot, shells and things. ~ Steven Hall, #NFDB
90:Well, what does "good" mean anyway? As Wittgenstein suggested, "good," like "game," has a family of meanings. Prominent among them is this one: "meets the criteria or standards of assessment or evaluation." ~ John Searle, #NFDB
91:Get a new dress. One that shows a lot of skin. Short. Strapless. Maybe a push-up bra too.” He actually had the audacity to do a quick assessment of my chest. “Eh, maybe not. But definitely some high heels. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
92:Other studies have shown that when people make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or product within ninety seconds, between 62 and 90 percent of that assessment is based on color alone. ~ Martin Lindstrom, #NFDB
93:...none of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today's assessment-mad exam culture. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
94:We do not look into mirrors, for example, to see our "true" selves, but to see what others are seeing, and what passes for inner reflection is often an agonizing assessment of how others are judging us. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich, #NFDB
95:At the individual level Swaraj is vitally connected with the capacity for dispassionate self-assessment, ceaseless self-purification and growing self-reliance.… It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
96:I am neither Republican nor Democrat. I am a registered independent because I find that I cast my votes not on the basis of party loyalty but on the issues of the moment and my assessment of the candidates. ~ Walter Cronkite, #NFDB
97:It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight. ~ Steven D Levitt, #NFDB
98:At the individual level Swaraj is vitally connected with the capacity for dispassionate self-assessment , ceaseless self purification and growing self-reliance.... It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
99:Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism. ~ Jacques Ellul, #NFDB
100:His realistic assessment, acknowledgment of failure, and ownership of the problem were key to developing a plan to improve performance and ultimately win. Most important of all, he believed winning was possible. ~ Jocko Willink, #NFDB
101:The important things were sensitivity to impressions, intuitive judgment, character assessment, and also patient bargaining skills. It had never so much as occurred to him to jump over walls or leap from roof to roof. ~ Amos Oz, #NFDB
102:There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski, #NFDB
103:This is Zach." I said as Daniel shook hands with him. "The youngest is Ryan. The obnoxious one is Brent."
"I respect that assessment." Brent said, and awkwardly bump knuckles with Daniel instead of a handshake. ~ Bree Despain,#NFDB
104:Today's internet bloggers and television's talking heads don't have that [a partnership]. No safety net. No brakes. No one there to question, doubt or inspire. No editor. [Carl Bernstein's A reporter's assessment] ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
105:Not the bravest. Or the most daring. In Dr. Moorcraft’s words, the greatest secret of the Plankholders was simply that, to the best of the army’s assessment, they were the ones who cared about no one but themselves. ~ Brad Meltzer, #NFDB
106:There was an almost musical flow to his illiterate speech, a kind of warm inclusiveness that paid no attention to any kind of social distinctions, and a shrewd, even penetrating, assessment of the chaos around him. ~ David Eddings, #NFDB
107:Task triage is the habit of making a realistic assessment of what degree of perfection is required for a task at the point of accepting it, so one doesn't need to rely on one's habit of procrastinating to lower the bar. ~ John Perry, #NFDB
108:I was an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises. A message would go round the department: 'Please give a list of your recent publications.' And I would send back a statement: 'None.' ~ Peter Higgs, #NFDB
109:Who the hell came up with this brilliant curse? (Aiden)
It was the best I could manage in a hurry. (Leta)
With those kinds of critical assessment skills you should consider running for political office. (Aiden) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
110:By tricky I meant I was getting an average of an 85 percent chance of failure and death, and it was only that low because my last diagnostic said my risk assessment module was wonky. (I know, that explains a lot about me.) ~ Martha Wells, #NFDB
111:In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski, #NFDB
112:In the book Classroom Assessment for Student Learning: Doing It Right, Using It Well (2004), Rick Stiggins et al. offer seven strategies for assessing learning that I have begun to layer into my daily workshop (Figure 4.4). ~ Cris Tovani, #NFDB
113:It is not for us to give an assessment to what happened, but in our opinion the reputation of British science, the reputation of the British government, and the reputation of the title 'Sir' has sustained heavy damage. ~ Andrey Illarionov, #NFDB
114:Is there something that may have caused the action other than my initial assessment (in the characterization phase)? Do I need to adjust my initial impressions in either direction, augmenting some elements or discounting others? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
115:Sacrifice was also in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, it was a personal, subjective assessment, a cost-benefit analysis that had no right answer, only a compass that spun around an individual’s variant of true north. Throe, ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
116:What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment. ~ Stanley Fish, #NFDB
117:I wasn’t entirely sure about Meredith’s assessment. Some people would love to have the killer be a guy born and raised in Wind Gap. Someone they went fishing with once, someone they were in Cub Scouts with. Makes a better story. ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
118:If we're not who we imagine we are, then is anybody else? If there's so much potential for others to judge us wrongly, then how can we be sure that our assessment of them in any way resembles the real person that lies underneath? ~ Gilly Macmillan, #NFDB
119:Was she terribly ravishing in her underclothes?” Livia asked craftily. “Yes,” Marcus said without thinking, and then scowled. “I mean, no. That is, I didn’t look at her long enough to make an assessment of her charms. If she has any. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
120:As to your being worthy, I don’t think falling in love has much to do with the worth of the object of love. But I’d dispute your assessment. I think you’re a fine woman, and I think you always try to be the best person you can be. ~ Charlaine Harris, #NFDB
121:In competitive archery, risk assessment has minimal bearing on quality of performance, since the archer has so little choice over shot selection. By contrast, in a hunt, shots vary in quality according to how well selected they may be. ~ Ernest Sosa, #NFDB
122:In 1994, the College Board changed the test’s name from Scholastic Aptitude Test to the Scholastic Assessment Test. Now according to the College Board, the letters don’t stand for anything anymore. Perhaps that itself is symbolic. ~ Alexandra Robbins, #NFDB
123:I think so much emphasis these days is placed upon achievement and skill and assessment that the joy has gone out of reading for many kids. Students become distracted by struggling to learn to read or by the pressure to achieve. ~ Emma Walton Hamilton, #NFDB
124:The critique that Van Itallie drafted and White edited, which was then published as the official AMA declaration on carbohydrate-restricted diets, was not a balanced assessment of the science, nor was it absent its own gross inaccuracies. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
125:After the Volcker Fund collapsed, I got another grant from the Lilly Endowment to do a history of the U.S., which I worked on from 1962-66. The original idea was to take the regular facts and put a libertarian assessment on everything. ~ Murray Rothbard, #NFDB
126:Conscience is all about using discernment, discrimination and assessment, rather than looking to the rather crude form of advice from the judge that's mostly attacking our sense of worth or value, instead of giving us helpful information. ~ Mark Coleman, #NFDB
127:Healing begins, the Denver Post announced Thursday morning. The headline spanned the full width of page one thirty-six hours after the attack. Ministers, psychiatrists, and grief counselors cringed. It was an insanely premature assessment. ~ Dave Cullen, #NFDB
128:A startup’s job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
129:The information we gain that conflicts with our original assessment or conclusion, we conveniently ignore or dismiss, while the information that confirms our original decision makes us increasingly certain that our conclusion was correct. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
130:You might loosen your corset strings,” he advised. “It will make your journey more pleasant.”
“I’m not wearing a c-corset,” she said without looking at him.
“You aren’t? My God.” His gaze slid over her with expert assessment. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
131:You can still tell the truth by "pointing to" an abstraction or assessment of your mind, if your intent is simply to point out your thought, rather than to make the other person believe your thought to be the "right interpretation" of reality. ~ Brad Blanton, #NFDB
132:The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. ~ Ann Patchett, #NFDB
133:Entomologists use that word 'foul' often when referring to the flavor of a caterpillar. They are rarely more specific than 'foul' or 'tasty.' I expect that is because they are leaving the assessment up to birds, and birds have a very binary approach. ~ Amy Leach, #NFDB
134:This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.’ The cherrypicking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war. * ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
135:Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
136:I encourage my students to be honest in their assessment of both the published work we read and the work of their classmates. I think there's always the occasion for discussing elements of craft, whether the student's poem is terrible or quite wonderful. ~ Cate Marvin, #NFDB
137:No foreign policy can be sustained in the United States of America without the informed consent of the American people. And informed means just that, successes and failure, a realistic assessment of where we are and what the president plans to do about it. ~ Joe Biden, #NFDB
138:Performance cannot be based on one assessment. You cannot determine the slope of a line given only one point, as there is no line to begin with. A single point in time does not show trends, improvement, lack of effort, or mathematical ability.… Sincerely, ~ Carol S Dweck, #NFDB
139:There are rare and precious moments, when one is a stranger in a room, that one can examine its inhabitants with little or no prejudice. Without knowing so much as their names, it is possible to form an assessment based purely upon observation and instinct. ~ Alan Bradley, #NFDB
140:In 2009, polls showed an impressive “revival of America’s global image in many parts of the world reflecting confidence in the new president.”53 One poll-based assessment of brand values even suggested the Obama effect was worth $2 trillion in brand equity. ~ Joseph S Nye Jr, #NFDB
141:Even after the Super Bowl victory of the New Orleans Saints, I have noticed a large number of people implying, with bad jokes, that Cajuns aren't smart. I would like to state for the record that I disagree with that assessment. Anybody that would build a city ~ Larry the Cable Guy, #NFDB
142:Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints. ~ Manuel De Landa, #NFDB
143:[The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that ] the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States. ~ Julian Assange, #NFDB
144:Okay, why couldn’t he just be drinking right now? Still, bassinet jockeying one of these pooping machines had to be better than dodging bullets.
Right?
V glanced at the matched set of milk addicts. Fine, maybe the goo-goo, gaga/Glock assessment was more of a fifty-fifty. ~ J R Ward,#NFDB
145:The success of an archery shot may bring food to the hunter's starving family, or may constitute a horrible murder. But these outcomes are irrelevant to the assessment of that shot as a hunter-archery shot, as an attempt to hit prey without running excessive risk of failure. ~ Ernest Sosa, #NFDB
146:Here's a simple way you can engage your intuition. When you are about to say something and you're not sure if you want to say it, ask yourself, "What is my motivation?" When you check your motivation you engage non-physical guidance and you will not be alone in you assessment. ~ Gary Zukav, #NFDB
147:You know, if I look at the wound on an angle, it reminds me of a stripper I know.” I amended my “complete asshole” assessment to include the words “from hell.” “So this is where we part ways, slowly drift apart, and eventually fail to keep in touch altogether, right?” I asked. ~ Jeff Strand, #NFDB
148:I have talked about choosing rather than acting from compulsion. When you feel that you have to live according to someone else's direction or live so that you never disappoint or hurt anybody, then your life is a continual assessment of whether or not you please other people. ~ Virginia Satir, #NFDB
149:I understand that you take the Bible, as written in English, translated many many times over the last three millennia as to be a more accurate, more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see around us than what I and everybody in here can observe. That, to me, is unsettling. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
150:He later underscored how tricky suspect assessment is by pointing out that just based on geographic history and physical description a good EAR-ONS suspect would be Tom Hanks. (Who, it should be emphasized, can be eliminated by the shooting schedule of Bosom Buddies alone). ~ Michelle McNamara, #NFDB
151:The Order of the Titans had agreed with his assessment. This generation, the Order would be successful where previous generations had failed, because this time they would steal mankind's inspiration. They would kill the muses for the greater good....
For the good of mankind. ~ Lisa Kessler,#NFDB
152:I was impressed, although unsurprised. She was obviously in the habit of thinking operationally, and was as matter-of-fact about it as she was effective. I’d already concluded she was trained. To that assessment I now added a probable minimum of several years of field experience. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
153:I would say my fraternity was nothing but a bunch of farm boys; we weren't really in the whole fraternity scene, but yeah, that's a safe assessment of who I am. I've lived that life, growing up in agriculture and then going off to college and joining a fraternity, livin' that life. ~ Luke Bryan, #NFDB
154:Brody cannot believe the size of the creature, and with a classic, practical understatement tells Quint his assessment: You're gonna need a bigger boat. Awestruck, they all view the full-sized, massive shark circling the boat. Quint estimates it is 25 feet long: Three tons of him. ~ Roy Scheider, #NFDB
155:He had worked out long ago that police officers evaluated a citizen on the
basis of three factors—his appearance, his occupation, and the way he
spoke; according to this assessment, a citizen in a police station would
either be treated with respect or despised and beaten. ~ Alaa Al Aswany,#NFDB
156:This strange new test called PISA, which stood for the Program for International Student Assessment. Instead of a typical test question, which might ask which combination of coins you needed to buy something, PISA asked you to design your own coins, right there in the test booklet. ~ Amanda Ripley, #NFDB
157:The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law. ~ David Mamet, #NFDB
158:But efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience— such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors— are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment. ~ Greg Lukianoff, #NFDB
159:Did all of Singer’s efforts to discredit mainstream science matter? When asked in 1995 where he got his assessments of ozone depletion, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, probably the most powerful man in Congress at the time, said, “my assessment is from reading people like Fred Singer.”93 ~ Naomi Oreskes, #NFDB
160:We have President-elect [Donald] Trump out there calling the CIA assessment that Russia was trying to help elect him ridiculous. He also questions - says he doesn't believe the earlier findings of all 17 intelligence agencies that Russia was trying to get involved in our elections. ~ George Stephanopoulos, #NFDB
161:Few generals were as brilliant as Robert E. Lee and few battles as titanic -- and puzzling -- as Gettysburg. Why did Lee fail? In Lost Triumph, Tom Carhart offers a bold and provocative new assessment. Agree or disagree, it is sure to stimulate debate among even the most seasoned Civil War buffs. ~ Jay Winik, #NFDB
162:The most recent edition of the test—called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)—was conducted in 2012, and it found that among the OECD’s thirty-four members, the United States ranked twenty-seventh, twentieth, and seventeenth in math, science, and reading, respectively. ~ Fareed Zakaria, #NFDB
163:The way that the stories go in the Snicket books is just the way stories naturally go to me. They're full of misery, and yet the misery ends up being slightly hilarious. And in terms of the warnings on the back of the books, that really started as an honest assessment of their marketability. ~ Daniel Handler, #NFDB
164:When I moved into one of the worst inner-cities in America to do missionary work I had to do risk assessment, and It was a risk. My family could have been in danger, house could get robbed at any minute but I count it all as nothing compared to knowing Jesus it was all worth it at the end of the day. ~ LeCrae, #NFDB
165:When I was a kid, I thought that if everyone looked up the way I did then everyone would want to study the universe just like me - how could they not? This naiveté is what tells me that my interest was more a calling than a rational comparative assessment about what to be when I grew up. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
166:Patch's eyes made a slow assessment of me, sharpening to vivid black. "I'm going to have a hard time sending you off with Scott in that dress. Just a heads-up: If you come home and the dress looks even slightly tampered with, I will track Scott down, and when I find him, it won't be pretty. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick, #NFDB
167:The use of online assessment tools is giving teachers a more fine-grained understanding of individual students' skills, and assisting them to determine the necessary next steps to enable them to achieve their own learning goals. We are seeing more effective differentiation in classrooms as a result. ~ Susan Mann, #NFDB
168:In 2000, a German researcher named Andreas Schleicher developed the Program for International Student Assessment test (PISA) to help nations determine whether their teenagers had the thinking skills necessary to succeed in the twenty-first century at college, in the workplace, and in life.4 ~ Julie Lythcott Haims, #NFDB
169:We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom. ~ Jonathan Raban, #NFDB
170:If you just want a comfortable life, the awards, and pats on the back then you play Christian Hip Hop safe. Because playing it safe will give you consistency, but if you're really in this to see peoples lives transform then you're gonna have to do some risk assessment - it is costly to rally try to impact people. ~ LeCrae, #NFDB
171:Richard Dawkins’ assessment of human worth may be depressing, but why, given atheism, is he mistaken when he says, “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference.… We are machines for propagating DNA.… It is every living object’s sole reason for being”? ~ William Lane Craig, #NFDB
172:If policy makers and program managers participate in an interdisciplinary assessment team, make informal visits to local families and have in-depth conversations with local providers and health authorities, the real needs and complex challenges of organizing good reproductive health services become apparent. ~ Ruth Simmons, #NFDB
173:But the sort of honor Richard was talking about was flattery, not truth. It wasn’t real. Honor that was given to you because of how you were born—that was just a delusion. She wasn’t going to rely on Parliament—or the people around her—to provide an assessment of herself. They were fickle and untrustworthy. ~ Courtney Milan, #NFDB
174:You can deceive yourself into thinking that America is a technological leader, but if you don't see what anyone else is doing you have no accurate assessment - you can't make an accurate assessment of where you fit and why. I consider our moving frontier in space as the anecdote to that downward trend. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
175:I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites. ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
176:Even without voting, illegal aliens do affect who gets elected president, and that's since the Electoral College elects the president, and the states are given 80% of their electoral votes based on their population, whether they include illegals or not, is the assessment that that is how they affect elections. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
177:Being a fine Southern gentleman, Finnegan Lane considered butter a dipping sauce, rather than a mere garnish, and he felt the exact same way about ranch dressing, honey mustard, sour cream, and even mayonnaise on occasion. And I agreed with his assessment one hundred percent, being a fine Southern lady myself. ~ Jennifer Estep, #NFDB
178:He stares back at me, amused, and I think the disguise hasn't convinced him, but he probably does this to all women--journalists, prosecutors, judges--a stripping-down, an assessment. Their reserve and competence don't fool him. He knows what they're like. He knows what they look and sound like when they're scared. ~ Flynn Berry, #NFDB
179:There was in Madison’s critical assessment of the state governments a discernible antidemocratic ethos rooted in the conviction that political popularity generated a toxic chemistry of appeasement and demagoguery that privileged popular whim and short-term interests at the expense of the long-term public interest. ~ Joseph J Ellis, #NFDB
180:the administration has the gall to say, as the president did in a recent interview: The trajectory of this planet overall is one toward less violence, more tolerance, less strife, less poverty. Sure it is. Even people directly reporting to the president had to be stunned by the ridiculousness of that glowing assessment. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
181:Having the ability to be brutally honest with yourself is the greatest challenge you face when creating a business model. Too often we oversell ourselves on the quality of the idea, service, or product. We don't provide an honest assessment of how we fit in the market, why customers will buy from us, and at what price. ~ Mark Cuban, #NFDB
182:I'm the CEO of a small growing company, and at each stage of our growth, it's become apparent to me that I need to adapt my leadership style and learn new approaches. When I completed the assessment, asking my own team to provide feedback on the 15 qualities of presence, I learned a lot about the leader I have yet to become. ~ Suzanne Bates, #NFDB
183:Do an assessment of your discipline and look for areas where you are not as disciplined as you need to be, and then make adjustments immediately. What if your prayers for career advancement have already been answered but they have not manifested because you aren’t displaying the discipline required to handle the opportunity? ~ DeVon Franklin, #NFDB
184:Piero stood next to her, his dark hair tucked back behind his ears. He looked almost gleeful as he began detailing Falco’s betrayal. “When I first heard the noise, I figured it was a rat or a leper pawing through a trash heap in the alley.” He gave Falco an appraising look as if to indicate his assessment had been mostly correct. ~ Fiona Paul, #NFDB
185:By his own assessment, he was no genius. He had "no great quickness of apprehension or wit" or "power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought." On the many occasions when I share those feelings, I find it encouraging to review those words because that Englishman did okay for himself—his name was Charles Darwin. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
186:And when I stepped into him gently, looked up into his eyes — eyes that saw me, all of me, and loved me still — I took a body assessment.
Knees: weak.
Cheeks: flushed.
Stomach: flipped.
Eyes: glistening.
Heart: full.
And the moment he bent to kiss me was the moment that marked the beginning of the rest of my life. ~ Staci Hart,#NFDB
187:But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
188:Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn’t enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin’s assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
189:Sometimes it happens that the computer's assessment is very abstract. It's correct, but it's not useful for a practical game. You have to prove the assessment with very strong moves and if you don't find all of these strong moves you may lose very quickly. For a computer this is not a problem, but for humans it is not so easy. ~ Vassily Ivanchuk, #NFDB
190:The statement, "The debt problem has become so extreme that we have no choice but to cut social spending" is presented as an objective assessment of our situation. But can you imagine a media commentator making the following assertion? "The debt problem has become so extreme that we have no choice but to raise taxes on the rich." ~ Linda McQuaig, #NFDB
191:Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
192:Within three hours of a disaster event there should be a recon damage assessment of the infrastructure and an educated guess as to the casualties and degree of imminent human peril. Then make the airdrops of supplies and personnel. Simultaneously, Seabees would be dropped in, with lights and generators, to begin rescue efforts. ~ Steven Van Zandt, #NFDB
193:The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising—all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism—are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop. Any attempt to make sense of democracy divorced from its relationship to capitalism is dubious. ~ Robert W McChesney, #NFDB
194:As we started working with leaders, providing them with assessment feedback, noticing the impact it was having on them, and their teams, a real story unfolded, and the book All the Leader You Can Be became what it is now - a guide to leaders who want to understand their strengths, and also appreciate how to enhance their leadership. ~ Suzanne Bates, #NFDB
195:The friends believe that Job is on trial—the defendant in a criminal case—and that he has been found guilty. But this is a backward trial. In their assessment, the judge has passed down the verdict, and now they, as the jury, need to try the case and find the evidence to uphold the verdict. To this end, Job is intensely cross-examined. ~ John H Walton, #NFDB
196:You know what the biggest fear among women who age is becoming bag women. They're 55, 60, with no relationship and no job, and they worry about it. Look, the dirty little secret is the women listening to me know that this is a very factual assessment of our culture today, and it is very unfair, and it hurts, and it bothers them greatly. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
197:a constant alternation between a highly concentrated critical assessment and a relaxed, receptive, nonjudgmental openness to experience. His attention coils and uncoils, its focus sharpens and softens, like the systolic and diastolic beat of the heart. It is out of this dynamic change of perspective that a good new work arises. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
198:Annabel pointed out. “I don’t think any of us doubted our marriageability.” “My new governess, Miss Flecknoe, would say that was an utterly improper comment,” Josie commented, raising her eyes from her book. “I can say that without hesitation because Miss Flecknoe finds any realistic assessment of relations between men and women improper. ~ Eloisa James, #NFDB
199:We shall have to stop looking askance on trends in relation to sex merely as a reproductive capability, i.e. that it is normal to make babies. Society will have to change in its assessment of what the proclivities of humanity may be. Our viewpoints on homosexuality, for example, may have to be reconsidered and more wisely adjusted. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
200:There is a biblical benchmark I now use. We will refer to this criterion for every hard question, big idea, topic, assessment of our own obedience, every “should” or “should not” and “will” or “will not” we ascribe to God, every theological sound bite. Here it is: If it isn’t also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn’t true. ~ Jen Hatmaker, #NFDB
201:He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of “trends” that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC’s creed: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”60 ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
202:life. I’ve thought about this a lot since my son, Ben, went missing, and every time I think about it, it also begs the question: if we’re not who we imagine we are, then is anybody else? If there’s so much potential for others to judge us wrongly, then how can we be sure that our assessment of them in any way resembles the real person that ~ Gilly Macmillan, #NFDB
203:assessment of some senior Western officials is that the Kremlin’s goal is to replace the Minsk agreement with an accord that would be more favorable to the Kremlin’s interests and would leave the separatists with a more economically viable enclave. The administration’s deliberations were described by a range of senior Pentagon, administration and ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
204:Right." Doctor Cherryman's face lit up. Here was a way for him to grapple with the problem that the reality of vampires had presented to him. "Let's say vampires exist. What does that mean?"
"That they're bloodsucking murderers here to kill us all?" Lucy and the Doctor gaped at Quin's bald-faced assessment.
"Tell me I'm wrong," Quin said. ~ Matt Forbeck,#NFDB
205:And it was kind of funny to see all these professional fighters unwilling to get within a mile of the female. Then again, if you wanted to survive doing the work they did, accurate risk assessment was something you developed early -- and even Qhuinn, who was the object of the protective instinct the Chosen was rocking, wouldn't have dared touch her. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
206:Much of the left—which had resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community’s unambiguous assessment of Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower—now suddenly embraced the intelligence community’s authority in its suggestion of Trump’s nefarious relationships with the Russians. ~ Michael Wolff, #NFDB
207:When I decide who to vote for as President, I ask myself who will be best for America and for the world. An important component of my answer involves my assessment of the candidate's willingness and ability to protect Israel's security, since I strongly believe that a strong Israel serves the interests of the United States and of world peace. ~ Alan Dershowitz, #NFDB
208:People often confuse leadership with managerial skills. I agree with their assessment. You certainly have the ability to inspire people. Minutiae, on the other hand, might not be your forte. That being said, even if you are not the most organized person in the world, it would be a shame not to let everyone benefit from your experience and wisdom. ~ Sylvain Neuvel, #NFDB
209:But stamped on her face was also regret that she had been wrong in her assessment. In those weeks she felt humiliated at having always ascribed a power to things that in the current hierarchies were insignificant: the alphabet, writing, books. Only then—I think today—did she, who seemed so disillusioned, so adult, come to the end of her childhood. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
210:Knowledge without devotion will be like a misfire. Therefore, says the Gita, ‘Have devotion, and knowledge will follow.’ This devotion is not mere lip worship, it is a wrestling with death. Hence, the Gita’s assessment of the devotee’s quality is similar to that of the sage. 17. Thus the devotion required by the Gita is no soft-hearted effusiveness. It ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
211:Our objective is to begin a national conversation to better support individuals and families living with ASD in Canada. The Summit will review the recent National Needs Assessment Survey and provide leaders with a better understanding of ASD surveillance across the country. We are pleased that Minister Bergen will be part of this important discussion. ~ Cynthia Carroll, #NFDB
212:The pack includes analysis and summary forms as well as very explicit links between assessment and individualised intervention...these materials are often lacking in published therapy programmes and are especially helpful...the pack provides very clear guidelines...overall it will be a very significant addition to speech and language therapy practice. ~ Linda Armstrong, #NFDB
213:Behind your reaction is a feeling that whatever is 'true' must be able to be expressed logically. Men, in particular, have a tendency to confuse correct logic with an accurate assessment of a situation. Be careful of any situation that you have to reason through logically, because if you have to work to reason it out, you're probably missing something. ~ L E Modesitt Jr, #NFDB
214:So, one of your shortcomings has been in letting your rational assessment of a situation keep you from participating in a psychologically driven trade. Yes, failing to participate in markets when the fundamentals are less important than the psychology. But how do you recognize that type of situation? Well, that’s the key question, isn’t it? [He laughs.] ~ Jack D Schwager, #NFDB
215:The evidence that at least one extraterrestrial civilization has visited Earth is extensive both in scope and detail. In its totality it comprises a body of evidence which at the very least supports the general assessment that extraterrestrial life has been detected, and that a vigorous program of research and serious diplomatic initiatives is warranted. ~ Steven M Greer, #NFDB
216:The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She was, in a sense, sitting at a craps table with her last stack of chips, trying again and again to hit it big. ~ Ann Patchett, #NFDB
217:there may be good reasons to continue investing in something to finalise it. But beware of doing so for the wrong reasons, such as to justify non-recoverable investments. Rational decision-making requires you to forget about the costs incurred to date. No matter how much you have already invested, only your assessment of the future costs and benefits counts. ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB
218:There may be good reasons to continue investing in something to finalize it. But beware of doing so for the wrong reasons, such as to justify non-recoverable investments. Rational decision-making requires you to forget about the costs incurred to date. No matter how much you have already invested, only your assessment of the future costs and benefits counts. ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB
219:Her assessment was that I had poor judgment, and my rape had immediately confirmed it. I believed that the rape had erased all of the progress I’d made in my time hiking and proved my mother right. Immediately. I was hurting with not only the shame of the rape, but also the shame of feeling I’d wanted to prove myself a valid, independent person—but I couldn’t. ~ Aspen Matis, #NFDB
220:Figuring out how to build a sustainable creative culture—one that didn’t just pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, excellence, communication, originality, and self-assessment but really committed to them, no matter how uncomfortable that became—wasn’t a singular assignment. It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job. And one that I wanted to do. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
221:...it is pretentious for photographers to believe that their pictures alone change things. If they did, we wouldn't be besieged by war, by incidents of genocide, by hunger. A more realistic assessment of photography's value is to point out that it is illustrative of what's going on, that it provides a record of history, that photographs can prompt dialogue. ~ Eugene Richards, #NFDB
222:Social scientist Alex Michalos, in his discussion of the perceived quality of experience, argued that people establish standards of satisfaction based on the assessment of three gaps: “the gap between what one has and wants, the gap between what one has and thinks others like oneself have, and the gap between what one has and the best one has had in the past. ~ Barry Schwartz, #NFDB
223:A person who refuses to give up will always succeed, eventually. Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he succeeded. NBA superstar Michael Jordan was once cut from his high school basketball team. After his first audition, screen legend Fred Astaire received the following assessment from an MGM executive: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
224:A pilot traditionally might have to fly to a coordinate and drop a bomb, and that was it,” Asaro says. “Now a drone operator has much more intimacy. Often he has to track a subject for weeks beforehand. The access to the intelligence is much greater. Sometimes they have to do damage assessment in the aftermath of an attack — to count the bodies pulled from the rubble. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
225:The English language needs a word for that feeling you get when you badly need help, but there is no one you can call because you're not popular enough to have friends, not rich enough to have employees, and not powerful enough to have lackeys. It is a very distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society? Enturdment? ~ David Wong, #NFDB
226:We become overly reliant on the strengths that got us where we are today. We also become isolated as we move up in the organization. Unless we have the benefit of assessment, and unless we invite feedback on our leadership, we continue to lean on strengths that can actually work against us, and fail to expand our leadership style in a way that makes us more effective. ~ Suzanne Bates, #NFDB
227:One of the most important things you can do as a leader is make sure you and your organization are delivering what you promised. The question I ask to make an assessment of this is “Did we exceed expectations?” This ensures my future success and that of my organization. The future is dim professionally for anyone who doesn’t exceed the expectations of customers or clients. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
228:Slackers were not well dressed, because there was no reason to dress smartly. Their uniform was old jeans, Converse trainers and warm, practical lumberjack shirts. They were not career-minded, for there was no reason to pursue the corporate dream. They were seen largely as apathetic, but it was an apathy born of a logical assessment of the options rather than innate laziness. ~ J M R Higgs, #NFDB
229:For example, you have a right to be first, at least sometimes. You are allowed to make mistakes, as long as you intend to learn from them. You have a right to say you don’t have enough time for something, if in fact you really don’t have enough time. STEP 2: Conducting an Honest Self-assessment Most feelings of submissiveness or aggressiveness have their roots in early life. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
230:...If it wasn’t for you, I’d think that angels were all totally interchangeable.’
‘You mean because I’m beyond perfect?’
‘No. Because you’re so humble.’
‘Humility’s overrated.’
‘So is clear self-assessment, apparently.’
‘Real warriors don’t stand for psychobabble.’
‘Or for rational thinking.’
He glances at my naked legs. ‘No, not that rational, I admit. ~ Susan Ee,#NFDB
231:None of us are perfect. You are still learning and growing. We all are. And this is a lesson for you: if you reengage on this task, if you do a stern self-assessment of how you lead and what you can do better, the outcome will be different. But it starts here. It starts at the board meeting when you go in, put your ego aside, and take ownership for the company’s failure here. ~ Jocko Willink, #NFDB
232:Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
233:Most economic historians concur with the assessment that ICT meets all of the criteria given above, and so should join the club of general purpose technologies. In fact, in a list of all the candidates for this classification compiled by the economist Alexander Field, only steam power got more votes than ICT, which was tied with electricity as the second most commonly accepted GPT.9 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
234:American spy agencies seemed rattled by the experiments too. I was shocked when the next Worldwide Threat Assessment — the annual report presented by the U.S. intelligence community to the Senate Armed Services Committee — described genome editing as one of the six weapons of mass destruction and proliferation that nation-states might try to develop, at great risk to America. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
235:I guess you can call it the ultimate hat trick, and all the players, myself included, are still reaping the rewards of being three-time national champions.
Dean, one of my fellow defensemen, calls it the Three P’s of Victory: parties, praise and pussy.
It’s a pretty fair assessment of the situation, because I’ve been on the receiving end of all three since our big win. ~ Elle Kennedy,#NFDB
236:The programs and planning are buried inside innocuous-sounding entities like the Pentagon’s Center for National and Nuclear Leadership Command Capability, FEMA’s Special Programs Division, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Balanced Survivability Assessment branch, or the Joint System Engineering and Integration Office (JSEIO) at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). To ~ Garrett M Graff, #NFDB
237:We’ve been told that we should assess other people as objectively as possible. That’s a tragic mistake. Assessments are never objective (at best we can say they are culturally grounded, if many people share the same assessment), but nevertheless we often believe that they are. We turn our subjective impressions into “truths” about a person; no wonder they resist our feedback. Rather ~ Frederic Laloux, #NFDB
238:The government of Qatar, as I mentioned, has proposed to come and lease Kenya's Tana River delta in order to farm there. What I am not sure of is, has an environmental impact assessment been made to ensure that exploiting this delta for agricultural activities is the best way we can use the delta?We must be concerned about the long-term impact of agricultural activities in the delta. ~ Wangari Maathai, #NFDB
239:An often-used assessment of present-day Singapore is that the People’s Action Party government transformed Singapore from a “colonial backwater” into a modern, prosperous global city. While it is true that the PAP transformed the city, it was certainly not a backwater. British Malaya was of great significance to global economic and political issues during the years between the two world wars. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
240:1. I am what I have. My possessions define me. 2. I am what I do. My achievements define me. 3. I am what others think of me. My reputation defines me. 4. I am separate from everyone. My body defines me as alone. 5. I am separate from all that is missing in my life. My life space is disconnected from my desires. 6. I am separate from God. My life depends on God’s assessment of my worthiness. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
241:Formative assessments nurture hope and say to students, 'You might not get this yet, but you will. Here is something else you can try that might help you understand and improve.' Formative assessment empowers teachers and students because it gives them specific information about individual performance. When teachers share the information with students, students have a concrete way to improve. ~ Cris Tovani, #NFDB
242:One can give or withhold in a manner far more effective, sophisticated, useful, which is quite invisible to people who think that giving or withholding is done by external assessment. If you seek some mark of favour or 'promotion', know that you are not ready for it. Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is irresistible. Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you are fit for it. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
243:Important element is deeply understanding our curriculum. Most teachers know what they're going to cover this week or this term. Few of us can specify precisely what students should know, understand, and be able to do as a result of any particular learning experience or set of learning experiences. Without that specificity, alignment between content, assessment, and instruction is weak. ~ Carol Ann Tomlinson, #NFDB
244:Most of us know intuitively that a score on a personality test, a rank on a standardized assessment, a grade point average, or a rating on a performance review doesn’t reflect your, or your child’s, or your students’, or your employees’ abilities. Yet the concept of average as a yardstick for measuring individuals has been so thoroughly ingrained in our minds that we rarely question it seriously. ~ Todd Rose, #NFDB
245:In a culture that prizes the can-do, self-starter attitude, to be a pessimist is simply to be a complainer – if you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem. To live in such a culture is to constantly live in the shadow of an obligatory optimism, a novel type of coercion that is pathologized early on in child education in the assessment: “Does not like to play with others. ~ Eugene Thacker, #NFDB
246:Humility is having an accurate assessment of your own nature and your own place in the cosmos. Humility is awareness that you are an underdog in the struggle against your own weakness. Humility is an awareness that your individual talents alone are inadequate to the tasks that have been assigned to you. Humility reminds you that you are not the center of the universe, but you serve a larger order. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
247:But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world! Suppose that one assessed the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, put into formulas; how absurd such a 'scientific' assessment of music would be! What would one have comprehended, understood, known about it? Nothing, absolutely nothing of what is really 'music' in it! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
248:Given its more substantial aim, a judgment is apt only if its constitutive alethic affirmation is not only apt but aptly apt. The subject must attain aptly not only the truth of his affirmation but also its aptness. And that in turn requires not only the proper operation of one's perception, memory, inference, etc., but also that one deploy such competences through competent epistemic risk assessment. ~ Ernest Sosa, #NFDB
249:We process emotionally salient information more rapidly and automatically, but with less accuracy. Frontal function—working memory, impulse control, executive decision making, risk assessment, and task shifting—is impaired, and the frontal cortex has less control over the amygdala. And we become less empathic and prosocial. Reducing sustained stress is a win-win for us and those stuck around us. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
250:Andreas Schleicher, who runs the Programme for International Student Assessment exams, a global evaluation of scholastic performance, observed that those scoring highest are Asian countries that have “ownership cultures—a high degree of professional autonomy for teachers … where teachers get to participate in shaping standards and curriculum and have ample time for continuous professional development. ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
251:Boris Nemtsov and I began to argue after Putin's return to the presidency in 2012. In my opinion, there was no longer a realistic chance to achieve regime change through peaceful political means, or real elections. Boris, on the other hand, never lost this hope. He felt that my assessment was premature and said: "You have to live a long time to see changes in Russia." He was deprived of that opportunity. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
252:Oldham’s decision disappointed Richard Graham, who had been looking forward to “taking everyone’s dirty underwear out of the closet in a trial.” And Oldham’s statement that should Jesse become involved in another crime, he “would not be so fortunate to be found not guilty by reason of insanity,” offended Graham, as Jesse had been adjudged to be sane. In Graham’s assessment, Oldham had behaved like a coward. ~ Gilbert King, #NFDB
253:Her youthful habit of consuming a picture just inches from its aromatic surface died a long time ago. Sebastian, when they were first dating, had once called it an affectation and she could never bring herself to do it again. His offhanded comment should have been a sign of future cruelties and standards of perfection, but instead she’d quickly agreed with his assessment and was grateful for his candor. She ~ Dominic Smith, #NFDB
254:No one seriously doubts Socrates' maxim: The unexamined life isn't worth living. Self-assessment and attempts at self-improvement are essential aspects of "the good life." Yes, we should engage in ruthless self-reflection and harsh scrutiny, but we should simultaneously acknowledge that such introspection will, at best, only result in a partial view of our minds at work. Complete objectivity is not an option. ~ Robert A Burton, #NFDB
255:According to the United States Department of Education (DOE), the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)11 reports that only 26 percent of the nation’s twelfth graders are proficient in math and only 38 percent are proficient in reading. There is also a twenty-nine percentage point gap between the reading proficiency of white and black twelfth-grade students. And these numbers are unchanged since 2009.12 ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
256:A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient. ~ Kathryn Schulz, #NFDB
257:didn’t have a mother or a father, but a stranger willingly chose me to be his son. You had a mother and father, and they let strangers take you. No, General, don’t pity me. You’re the one who’s had the worse deal.” It was shocking and it was true. The extraordinary clarity of his assessment hit her so hard that she almost gasped. It told her things she didn’t want to know about herself. None of them changed her intentions. ~ Karen Traviss, #NFDB
258:As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next. ~ Ibn Warraq, #NFDB
259:Have you ever noticed that? We base our assessment of the intelligence of others almost entirely on how closely their thinking matches our own. I'm sure that there are people out there who violently disagree with me on most things, and I'm broad-minded enough to conceded that they might possibly not be completely idiots, but I much prefer the company of people who agree with me.
You might want to think about that. ~ David Eddings,#NFDB
260:To conclude this discussion, assessment of justice demands engagement with the 'eyes of mankind',first, because we may variously identify with the others elsewhere and not just with our local community;second, because our choices and actions may affect the lives of others far as well as near;and third,because what they see from their respective perspective of history and geography may help us to overcome our own parochialism. ~ Amartya Sen, #NFDB
261:And it wasn’t just one warning. Eight years before the Panel on Climate Change’s report, an assessment of global warming’s impacts in New York City had also cautioned of potential flooding. “Basically pretty much everything that we projected happened,” says Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the cochair of the Panel on Climate Change and coauthor of that 2001 report. ~ Deborah Blum, #NFDB
262:No officer should be required or permitted to take part in the management of political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns. Their right to vote and to express their views on public questions, either orally or through the press, is not denied, provided it does not interfere with the discharge of their official duties. No assessment for political purposes on officers or subordinates should be allowed. ~ Rutherford B Hayes, #NFDB
263:You should dress her better, you know."
"I'm not interested in putting clothes on her," Adrian called as he steered me away.
"Watch it," I warned through gritted teeth, "or you might be the one with the wineglass in your face."
"I'm playing a part, little dhampir. One that's going to make sure you stay out of trouble." Adrian gave me a head-to-toe assessment. "That guy was right about the clothes, though. ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
264:Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
265:SALES ASSESSMENT ONLINE. The world's first customized sales assessment, renamed a "successment," will judge your selling skill level in 12 critical areas of sales knowledge and give you a diagnostic report that includes fifty mini sales lessons. This amazing tool will rate your sales abilities and explain your opportunities for sales growth. This program is aptly named KnowSuccess because you can't know success until you know yourself. ~ Jeffrey Gitomer, #NFDB
266:It wasn’t the Sierra Club that tried to pressure the National Academy of Sciences over the 1983 Carbon Dioxide Assessment; it was officials from the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t Environmental Defense that worked with Bill Nierenberg to alter the Executive Summary of the 1983 Acid Rain Peer Review Panel; it was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And it was the Wall Street Journal spreading the attack ~ Naomi Oreskes, #NFDB
267:It turns out that since 1825, researchers have known that Graves’ disease is often correlated with stressful life events, which Trinity had in spades. It was clear that her problems with emotional regulation were overlaid on the hyperthyroidism, making her time in the classroom that much more difficult. The crazy thing is that many busy physicians do their entire assessment of ADHD based on behavioral symptoms alone, without a stethoscope ~ Nadine Burke Harris, #NFDB
268:In a tiny number of places I have added a personal recollection in a footnote. But I have kept them out of the text. Personal anecdote and historical evaluation are in my view best kept apart. Leaving aside the frailties of memory, most of what passes by on a daily basis has only ephemeral resonance. Assessment of the significance of major occurrences nearly always requires not just detailed knowledge but the passage of time in which to digest it. ~ Ian Kershaw, #NFDB
269:Going over to their prisoner, Vishous performed a visual assessment on Xcor. When they’d brought the bastard in here, V had strapped him onto the wooden slab table face-up and spread-eagled, locking stainless-steel cuffs on those wrists and ankles and around that thick neck—and what do you know, the guy was right where he’d left him. Color was passable. Eyes were closed. Head wound at the rear of the skull was no longer leaking, having healed already. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
270:My personal assessment is that Dr. King is the greatest American we have ever produced. I can argue for Lincoln, I can argue for FDR, but for my money, King is the greatest American we have ever produced. His only weapon was love. He transforms a nation, transforms the world with one weapon and that of course being again the weapon of love. So that for me, King is the quintessential example of everything that I could ever want to be in my lifetime. ~ Tavis Smiley, #NFDB
271:To conclude this discussion, assessment of justice demands engagement with the 'eyes of mankind',
first, because we may variously identify with the others elsewhere and not just with our local community;
second, because our choices and actions may affect the lives of others far as well as near;
and third,because what they see from their respective perspective of history and geography may help us to overcome our own parochialism. ~ Amartya Sen,#NFDB
272:To the degree that the British right hand didn’t know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls—deceptions, in a less charitable assessment—to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain’s wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders. ~ Scott Anderson, #NFDB
273:Bleary-eyed one morning, with caffeine still missing from my system, I fumbled my way along the dusty path to the guest tents, calling out ‘Good morning!’ in as cheery a voice as the hour would allow (it was barely after five o’clock, and the sun had only just cracked the horizon). I heard a rhythmic thumping, getting rapidly louder, and I turned to find 1,600 pounds of pissed-off cow bearing down on me. Clearly it disagreed with my assessment of the morning. ~ Peter Allison, #NFDB
274:To maintain the harmony of authority and obedience, to chastise the proud, to protect the weak, to reward the deserving, to banish vice and idleness from his dominions, to secure the traveller and merchant, to restrain the depredations of the soldier, to cherish the labors of the husbandman, to encourage industry and learning, and, by an equal and moderate assessment, to increase the revenue, without increasing the taxes, are indeed the duties of a prince . . . ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
275:They accepted her assessment of the path the humans would follow, if given free rein over the planet. Genocide – of other species and of their own – was ever a tool in the human kit. The spiders have been responsible for a few extinctions along the way, too, but their early history with the ants has led them down a different road. They have seen the way of destruction, but they have seen the way the ants made use of the world, too. Everything can be a tool. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky, #NFDB
276:It’s kind of odd when you think about it. We’ve all got these huge gaps of information in our knowledge of what’s really going on with the people around us every day. The difference is that when we think of other folks, we fill in the gaps with the most optimistic assessment, and when we think of our own situations, we fill in the gaps with worst-case scenarios. It’s like we can have faith and confidence on behalf of others, but we can’t have them on our own behalf! ~ Pete Wilson, #NFDB
277:Try it on." "It's probably a little snug. Marcie tends to buy down when it comes to sizing." He merely smiled. "It has a slit up the thigh." His smile depened. "Zip it up?" Patch's eyes made a slow assessment of me, sharpening to vivid black. "I'm going to have a hard time sending you off with Scott in that dress. Just a heads-up: If you come home and the dress looks even slightly tampered with, i will track Scott down, and when i find him, it won't be pretty. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick, #NFDB
278:I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment, and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. In the abstract, you can complain about 'Big Brother' and how this is a potential program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then, I think we've struck the right balance. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
279:are exceedingly grateful for what they have, regularly acknowledge themselves for what they’ve accomplished, and are always at peace with where they are in their lives. It’s the dueling idea that I am doing the best that I can in this moment, and at the same time, I can and will do better. This balanced self-assessment prevents that feeling of lack—of not being, having, doing enough—while still allowing them to constantly strive to close their potential gap in each area. ~ Hal Elrod, #NFDB
280:As to the Income Tax, my opinion is that the needful revenue would be fairly and most fairly raised if paid by property, and by individuals in proportion to their property. A Property Tax should be an assessment upon all land and buildings, and canals and railroads, but not on property such as machinery, stock in trade, etc. The aristocracy have squeezed all they can out of the mass of the consumers, and now they lay their daring hands on those not wholly impoverished. ~ John Bright, #NFDB
281:Even Colonel Lang, watching the Americans from the other side of Djebel Naemia, had been surprised by their timid initial approach to the Maknassy heights; a more forceful attack, he concluded, could have shortened the Tunisian campaign by weeks. In his view, the Americans appeared reluctant to risk heavy casualties in a decisive battle, preferring to crush their foes with material superiority even if that meant extending the fight. There was truth in that assessment too. ~ Rick Atkinson, #NFDB
282:I'm familiar with the myth, I'm merely surprised that a female
would be familiar with the classics."
"You must have a very limited experience with my sex," Alexandra
said, surprised. "My grandfather said most women are every bit as
intelligent as men."
She saw his eyes take on the sudden gleam of suppressed laughter
and assumed, mistakenly, that he was amused by her assessment of
female intelligence rather than her remark about his inexperience
with women. ~ Judith McNaught,#NFDB
283:Stiggins’s Seven Practices of Assessment FOR Learning Where am I going? Provide a clear and understandable vision of the learning target. Use examples and models of strong and weak work. Where am I now? Offer regular descriptive feedback. Teach students to self-assess and set goals. How can I close the gap? Design lessons to focus on one aspect of quality at a time. Teach students focused revision. Engage students in self-reflection, and let them keep track of and share their learning. ~ Cris Tovani, #NFDB
284:It wasn’t the Sierra Club that tried to pressure the National Academy of Sciences over the 1983 Carbon Dioxide Assessment; it was officials from the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t Environmental Defense that worked with Bill Nierenberg to alter the Executive Summary of the 1983 Acid Rain Peer Review Panel; it was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And it was the Wall Street Journal spreading the attack on Santer and the IPCC, not Mother Jones. ~ Naomi Oreskes, #NFDB
285:She looked young and scared and helpless. Myron thought about that last one for a moment. Helpless. She turned and met his eyes, and there was a challenge there. Was helpless a fair assessment? Stupid as it might be to think about it, how much of a role was sexism playing here? Play the chauvinism card for a moment. If Aimee was a guy, a big high school football jock, for example, would he be this worried? The truth was, he was indeed treating her differently because she was a girl. Was ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
286:To die proudly when it is not possible to live proudly anymore. Death, chosen of one's own free will, death at the the right time, with brightness and cheer, done in the midst of children and witnesses, so that it is still really possible to take one's leave, when the one taking leave IS STILL THERE, with a real assessment of what one has achieved and willed, a Summation of life — all the opposite of the pitiful and appalling comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
287:When one gets to Clement or Hippolytus, we are clearly a long way from what we find in Paul and the Gospels, where the influence of the Passover is still strongly present and the meal is seen as a family meal, taken in the home, a memorial meal to remember Jesus’ death until his return...Here then is a cautionary reminder — the less Jewish the approach one takes to the Lord’s Supper, the more likely one is to be wrong about one’s assessment of what is the case about the elements. ~ Ben Witherington III, #NFDB
288:In 2007 one of its biggest clients, Goldman Sachs, demanded that AIG put up billions of dollars more in collateral as required under its swaps contracts. AIG disclosed the existence of the collateral dispute in November. At the December conference, Charles Gates, a longtime insurance analyst for Credit Suisse, asked pointedly what it meant that “your assessment of certain super-senior credit default swaps and the related collateral . . . differs significantly from your counterparties. ~ Andrew Ross Sorkin, #NFDB
289:Jaws dropped this week when Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who until recently was NATO’s civilian head, stated that it is highly likely that Russia will soon stage a violent provocation against a Baltic state, which being NATO countries, will cause a crisis over the Alliance’s Article 5 provision for collective self-defense. Rasmussen merely said what all defense experts who understand Putin already know, but this was not the sort of reality-based assessment that Western politicians are used to hearing. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
290:Try it on."
"It's probably a little snug. Marcie tends to buy down when it comes to sizing." He merely smiled.
"It has a slit up the thigh." His smile depened.
"Zip it up?"
Patch's eyes made a slow assessment of me, sharpening to vivid black. "I'm going to have a hard time sending you off with Scott in that dress. Just a heads-up, if you come home and the dress looks even slightly tampered with, I will track Scott down, and when I find him, it won't be pretty. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,#NFDB
291:Combining the experience of a seasoned university president with the analysis of a respected legal scholar, Derek Bok explores what he concludes are 'signs of excessive commercialization in every part of the university.' His somber assessment of the current state of athletics, scientific research, and distance education, and his call for review and restraint, should engage the attention of every faculty senate in the country. He has given us a timely, candid, courageous, and important book. ~ Frank H T Rhodes, #NFDB
292:to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) – the most dependable assessment data available – India’s share of the volume of international arms imports increased from 7 per cent to 14 per cent during 2009–13 compared to the previous five years. Informal estimates say that India could end up spending around Rs 6,70,000 crore on importing arms during this decade alone. Indigenous military production accounts for a pitiful 30 per cent of the country’s total armament requirements ~ Josy Joseph, #NFDB
293:And sometimes, evaluations contain judgments that go beyond the assessment itself: Not only didn’t you qualify in the backstroke, but you were naïve to think you would, and so, once again, you’ve fallen short of your potential. The judgment that you are naïve or falling short is not based on the assessment—the outcome of the race. It’s an additional layer of opinion on top of it. And it is the bullwhip of negative judgment—from ourselves or others—that produces much of our anxiety around feedback. ~ Douglas Stone, #NFDB
294:If instead policy makers and program managers participate in an interdisciplinary assessment team, make informal visits to local families and have in-depth conversations with local providers and health authorities, the real needs and complex challenges of organizing good reproductive health services become apparent.The first country that implemented this participatory program of assessment, research and policy development was Brazil. I was one of the outsiders who provided support to the initiative. ~ Ruth Simmons, #NFDB
295:It has taken me a long time to realize where I most disagree with Marx. His assessment of capitalism is far too favorable. He took its instability, inhumanity and irrationality to be signs that it was a merely transitional form, which had delivered into humanity's hands the means to a much better way of life than any that have ever existed on earth. Marx could not bring himself to believe that our species is so benighted, irrational and slavish that it would put up with such a monstrous way of life. ~ Allen W Wood, #NFDB
296:AFB makes flavor coatings for dry pet foods. To test the coatings, they first need to make small batches of plain kibble and add the coatings. The flavored kibbles are then presented to consumer panels for feedback. The panelists—Spanky, Thomas, Skipper, Porkchop, Rover, Elvis, Sandi, Bela, Yankee, Fergie, Murphy, Limburger, and some three hundred other dogs and cats—reside at AFB’s Palatability Assessment Resource Center (PARC), about an hour’s drive from the company’s suburban St. Louis headquarters. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
297:So far as Chairman Mao's own hopes were concerned, he initiated the "Cultural Revolution" in order to avert the restoration of capitalism, but he had made an erroneous assessment of China's actual situation. In the first place, the targets of the revolution were wrongly defined, which led to the effort to ferret out "capitalist roaders in power in the Party". Blows were dealt at leading cadres at all levels who had made contributions to the revolution and had practical experience, including Comrade Liu Shaoqi. ~ Deng Xiaoping, #NFDB
298:At a 2017 conference on artificial intelligence and global security, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned participants against complacency when it came to Chinese AI capabilities. Predicting that China would match American AI capabilities in five years, Schmidt was blunt in his assessment: “Trust me, these Chinese people are good. . . . If you have any kind of prejudice or concern that somehow their system and their educational system is not going to produce the kind of people that I’m talking about, you’re wrong. ~ Kai Fu Lee, #NFDB
299:The most common mistake you'll make is forgetting to keep your own scorecard. Very little at work reinforces your ability to do this, so you will have to be vigilant. When evaluators give you an assessment, they are just guessing at who you are; they certainly are not the ones who know your potential. They can rate you and influence you, but they don't get to define you. That's your most honorable assignment: to define, every day through the way you deliver your work, the scope and nature of your inherent abilities. ~ Charlotte Beers, #NFDB
300:Segmentation: Consumers’ purchasing behavior and attitudes towards brands differ from one market sector to another, depending largely on product-, market- and distribution-related factors. For this reason, the value of a brand can only be determined precisely through the separate assessment of individual segments that represent a homogenous customer group. Apart from this, brand management can only obtain the insights it needs to increase the brand’s value systematically if the brand has been evaluated in all its segments. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
301:But I knew the first question Mom asked Gail was, Is its a boy or a girl? Because, for some reason, that is the first thing everybody wants to know the minute you’re born. Should we label it with pink or blue? Wouldn’t want anyone to mistake the gender of a infant! Why is that so important? Its a baby! And why does it have to be a simple answer? One or the other? Not all of us fit so neatly into the category we get saddled with on Day One when the doctor glances down and makes a quick assessment of the available equipment. ~ Ellen Wittlinger, #NFDB
302:Dr. Rose has an accurate but tragic assessment of the plight of SeaWorld’s orcas. “I personally think,” she says, “all captive orcas, whether caught in the wild or born in captivity, are behaviorally abnormal. They are like the children in Lord of the Flies—unnaturally violent because they do not have any of the normal societal brakes on their immature tendency toward violence. Children can be very violent, but under normal circumstances, they are socialized to suppress that violence and channel it productively as they mature. ~ John Hargrove, #NFDB
303:External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now. If the problem is something in your own character, who’s stopping you from setting your mind straight? And if it’s that you’re not doing something you think you should be, why not just do it? —But there are insuperable obstacles. Then it’s not a problem. The cause of your inaction lies outside you. —But how can I go on living with that undone? Then depart, with a good conscience, as if you’d done it, embracing the obstacles too. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
304:Patch’s eyes made a slow assessment of me, sharpening to vivid black. “I’m going to have a hard time sending you off with Scott in that dress. Just a heads-up: If you come home and the dress looks even slightly tampered with, I will track Scott down, and when I find him, it won’t be pretty.”
“I’ll relay the message.”
“If you tell me where he’s hiding, I’ll relay it myself.”
I had to work not to smile. “Something tells me your message would be a lot more direct.”
“Let’s just say he’d get the point. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,#NFDB
305:I was in a pharmacy and I saw the warnings on the backs of poisonous substances, and I thought, "Well, that's what I can do." So I wrote a list of ingredients in the book, and warnings that they shouldn't consume those ingredients. The editor and the publisher thought that it was a great way to go in terms of reverse psychology, but it honestly hadn't occurred to me that it was reverse psychology. I just thought that it was sort of an honest assessment making clear that if you were timid or easily disturbed, you could turn away. ~ Daniel Handler, #NFDB
306:When you are unskilled yet unaware, you often experience what is now known in psychology as the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological phenomenon that arises sometimes in your life because you are generally very bad at self-assessment. If you have ever been confronted with the fact that you were in over your head, or that you had no idea what you were doing, or that you thought you were more skilled at something than you actually were – then you may have experienced this effect. It is very easy to be both unskilled and unaware of it, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
307:Focus on something that has high value to someone else, be really rigorous in making that assessment, because natural human tendency is wishful thinking, so the challenge to entrepreneurs is telling what's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking to them as opposed to pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit, be very rigorous in your self analysis, certainly being extremely tenacious, and just work like hell. Put in 80-100 hours every week. All these things improves the odds of success ~ Elon Musk, #NFDB
308:My assessment of Julian Assange is a professional one, really, of what he's managed to achieve, and the idea that he came up with, which set the world alight and continues to inspire others like Snowden [NSA leaker Edward Snowden], about the secret goings-on that are done in our name with our tax dollars on behalf of big business or politics. He launched the revolutionary idea that citizens can start to claim back a paradigm for questioning power structures and those in authority through an anonymous, whistle-blowing website. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch, #NFDB
309:It would be indeed unusual if it turned out that the set of orders that our mind is able to construct and accept, having as it does a deep sense of “understanding the essence of things,” matches precisely the set of all possible orders to be detected in the Universe as a whole. We should admit that this is not impossible, yet it does seem highly improbable. This way of thinking, so modest in its assessment of our abilities, is probably the only way recommended, given our lack of knowledge, because we are not aware of our limitations. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
310:1. Situation. Describe a situation that is, or was, emotionally significant to you (that is, that you deeply care about). Focus on one situation at a time. 2. Your Response. Describe what you did in response to that situation. Be specific and exact. 3. Analysis. Then analyze, in the light of what you have written, what precisely was going on in the situation. Dig beneath the surface. 4. Assessment. Assess the implications of your analysis. What did you learn about yourself? What would you do differently if you could re-live the situation? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
311:I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment-which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of scepticism that this violence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
312:Since the birth control pill affects the menstrual cycle, it’s not surprising that it may affect a woman’s patterns of attraction as well. Scottish researcher Tony Little found women’s assessment of men as potential husband material shifted if they were on the pill. Little thinks the social consequences of his finding may be immense: “Where a woman chooses her partner while she is on the Pill, and then comes off it to have a child, her hormone-driven preferences have changed and she may find she is married to the wrong kind of man. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
313:It was in Horace Greeley that Margaret recognized a “go-ahead, fearless adroitness” that was simply “American.” Waldo’s deprecatory assessment that Greeley was “no scholar,” but rather a “mother of men . . . an abettor,” captured the very reasons Margaret quickly warmed to the tall, unkempt newspaperman, whose thick wire-rimmed glasses, settled unsteadily on his ruddy baby face, were the only hint of erudition in a carelessly rustic ensemble that usually included an old white coat of Irish linen, heavy boots, and baggy black trousers. ~ Megan Marshall, #NFDB
314:When I turned 50, I threw myself a big birthday party, and I looked seriously at what my life has been about. I recommend this to everybody. Ask yourself, "What have I done? How did I do it? Where'd I mess up? Where did I do well?" When I did this assessment of my life, I said to myself, "It was really good." I made a lot of people laugh, made a lot of people cry in a good way, brought a lot of joy to people, picked up a lot of garbage. And in all those years, I saw a lot. I went to foreign lands. I met interesting people. And I got it! ~ Bette Midler, #NFDB
315:These algorithms, which I'll call public relevance algorithms, are-by the very same mathematical procedures-producing and certifying knowledge. The algorithmic assessment of information, then, represents a particular knowledge logic, one built on specific presumptions about what knowledge is and how one should identify its most relevant components. That we are now turning to algorithms to identify what we need to know is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of God. ~ Tarleton Gillespie, #NFDB
316:Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth-century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. Today, the mass audience (the successor to the “public”) can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions. ~ Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, #NFDB
317:The intelligence services would probably be in a better position to make an assessment of the advancement of the Iranian nuclear program than Podhoretz or Ledeen. They don't have access to any specific information. So for them to dismiss it has no great value because they have no authority whatsoever on this issue. For them to push forward with their efforts to get a war started between the U.S. and Iran, you certainly cannot say that Iran does not have a nuclear program. If you say that, then the justification for war has basically been eliminated. ~ Trita Parsi, #NFDB
318:I have failed to be an appropriate model for Christian conduct many times. At significant points, when I should have led by example, I failed to embody the very principles I publicly affirm. I have been intolerant, greedy, slothful, and even dishonest. Were someone to say I was an example for how others should live, I would be flattered but would know their assessment was inaccurate. To say Jesus is 'only an example,' as if that were a small thing, underestimates not only the profound difficulty of serving such a role, but also discounts its rarity. ~ Philip Gulley, #NFDB
319:We have self-assessment tools, computer-based tools to see how we are performing mentally in outer space and there's some also very interesting technology and work that's being funded by NRSBI to look at facial recognition to look at your patterns to see if you're experiencing stress or fatigue. It's a kind of thing that I think will gain acceptance with gradually. But it probably has more to immediate application in things like homeland security, and looking at facial recognition of people going through airports and things like that to see who's under stress. ~ Leroy Chiao, #NFDB
320:In a stroke, twenty-one-year-old Danny Kahneman had exerted more influence upon the Israeli army—the institution on which the society depended for its survival—than any psychologist had ever done or ever would do. The obvious next step for him was to go off and get his PhD and become Israel’s leading expert in personality assessment and selection processes. Harvard was home to some of the leading figures in the field, but Danny decided, without anyone’s help, that he wasn’t bright enough to go to Harvard—and didn’t bother to apply. Instead he went to Berkeley. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
321:To speak only of food inspections: the United States currently imports 80% of its seafood, 32% of its fruits and nuts, 13% of its vegetables, and 10% of its meats. In 2007, these foods arrived in 25,000 shipments a day from about 100 countries. The FDA was able to inspect about 1% of these shipments, down from 8% in 1992. In contrast, the USDA is able to inspect 16% of the foods under its purview. By one assessment, the FDA has become so short-staffed that it would take the agency 1,900 years to inspect every foreign plant that exports food to the United States. ~ Marion Nestle, #NFDB
322:Interpreting animals’ eating behaviors is tricky. By way of example, one of the highest compliments a dog can pay its food is to vomit. When a “gulper,” to use Pat Moeller’s terminology, is excited by the aroma of a food, it will wolf down too much too fast. The stomach overfills, and the meal is reflexively sent back up to avoid any chance of a rupture. “No consumer likes that, but it’s the best indication that the dog just loved it.” Fortunately for the staff at the AFB Palatability Assessment Resource Center, there are other ways to gauge a pet food’s popularity. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
323:But the history of science—by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans—teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
324:A more generous assessment of the learning styles movement is that, in attempting to address the inherent diversity of classrooms, it has broadened the range of pedagogical options available. As Jim Scrivener (2012: 106) argues, even if learning styles are simply unfounded hunches, ‘perhaps their main value is in offering us thought experiments along the lines of “what if this were true?” – making us think about the ideas and, in doing so, reflecting on our own default teaching styles and our own current understanding of learner differences and responses to them. ~ Scott Thornbury, #NFDB
325:Suppose you had a small electrical fire and... a structural engineer [looked] at your home's wiring [and] reports that the wiring is "shot" and there is a 50% chance that your house would burn down in the next few years unless you replace all the wiring. The job will cost $20,000... so you get an independent assessment. The next engineer agrees with the first warning. You can either continue to shop for additional evaluations until you find the one engineer in 1,000 that is willing to give you the answer you want, "Your family is not in danger" or you can change the wiring. ~ Steven Chu, #NFDB
326:In everyday life, if people intend to reach a true assessment of someone, to decide whether he is bad or good, they do not base the investigation on those periods of his life when he was untroubled by external circumstances; they look at how he behaved when he was afflicted by misfortune or blessed by success, because they think that the only way to tell whether a man is fully qualified is to see whether or not he is capable of enduring total changes of fortune with courage and without compromising his principles. This is how one should examine a system of government as well... ~ Polybius, #NFDB
327:The government’s Intelligence Assessment Department is a very small federal agency with very large computers, located in Sterling, Virginia. The IAD’s purpose is to maintain files of names, faces, physical attributes and personal preferences of national security threats and to analyze data about all of the above. If anybody’s ever wondered why the CIA or the military can be so certain that one bearded thirty-year-old on the streets of Kabul is an innocent businessman and, to our Western eyes, an identical one a block away is an al Qaeda operative, IAD is the reason. However, ~ Jeffery Deaver, #NFDB
328:We can feel compelled about something or someone, and this feeling may be influenced by survival reactions from the brainstem’s input and the evaluative activities of the limbic area as much as it is a fair assessment of a present situation. Awareness of the comings and goings of limbically induced states can help create an internal mental space of awareness in which to observe and not react to limbic lava or limbic withdrawals when they occur. This mental space enables us to pause and reflect, giving time for the wash of feelings to move on and for new states to be created. ~ Daniel J Siegel, #NFDB
329:The task of wealth generation for the nation has to be woven around national competencies. The Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) task team has identified core areas that will spearhead our march towards becoming a knowledge society. The areas are: information technology, biotechnology, space technology, weather forecasting, disaster management, tele-medicine and tele-education, technologies utilizing traditional knowledge, service sector and infotainment which is the emerging area resulting from the convergence of information and entertainment. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
330:Catmull says: Early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I . . . choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them go . . . from suck to non-suck . . . We are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process—reworking, reworking and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul. ~ Matthew Syed, #NFDB
331:Standing near the wall, surrounded by what looked like a group of total fratty jockish dudes, was a man. A very fine man. He looked a few years younger than me, with brown hair that fell all over his head in an artfully messy way that looked like he might have just rolled out of bed, but you knew was done on purpose. He had thick, pretty lips that were made for sin, stretching into a delicious smile that showed even teeth. Dimples. Fuck me up, we have dimples! Deep, deep dimples that I wanted to put my tongue into. I blushed a fire red, but I didn’t stop my depraved up and down assessment. ~ T J Klune, #NFDB
332:Philosophy is to become a subject on the Irish Republic’s school curriculum for the first time under a plan developed by minister for education Jan O’Sullivan, to give “students an opportunity to explore the concepts and ideas of philosophy in the 21st century.” Believing that it will make “a significant contribution to giving students the tools to critically engage in an informed manner with the world around them” the Minister says she will ask the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) to design a short Philosophy course that can be taught in the early years of secondary school. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
333:Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over. ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB
334:The plain, inexorable fact was that any attempt of the America Negro to overthrow his oppressor with violence would not work...The courageous efforts of our own insurrectionist brothers, such as Denmark Vassey and Nat Turner, should be eternal reminders to us that a violent rebellion is doomed from the start. Anyone leading a violent rebellion must be willing to make an honest assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that would delight in exterminating thousands of black men, women, and children. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
335:The primary problem with modern psychiatry is its reduction of mental illness to bodily dysfunction. Objectification of those identified as mentally ill, by insisting on the somatic nature of their illness, may apparently simplify matters and help protect those trying to provide care from the pain experienced by those needing support. But psychiatric assessment too often fails to appreciate personal and social precursors of mental illness by avoiding or not taking account of such psychosocial considerations. Mainstream psychiatry acts on the somatic hypothesis of mental illness to the detriment of understanding people's problems. ~ Thomas Szasz, #NFDB
336:Try to imagine the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him. If you put a room full of journalists into this situation they would immediately begin ripping on each other, taking the piss out of the instructors, asking intentionally stupid questions. If the boss wants us to waste half a day on Romper Room bullshit, we could at least have some fun. My HubSpot colleagues, however, seem to take the DISC personality assessment seriously. The ~ Dan Lyons, #NFDB
337:Respectable opinion would never consider an assessment of the Reagan Doctrine or earlier exercises in terms of their actual human costs, and could not comprehend that such an assessment—which would yield a monstrous toll if accurately conducted on a global scale—might perhaps be a proper task in the United States. At the same level of integrity, disciplined Soviet intellectuals are horrified over real or alleged American crimes, but perceive their own only as benevolent intent gone awry, or errors of an earlier day, now overcome; the comparison is inexact and unfair, since Soviet intellectuals can plead fear as an excuse for their services to state violence. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
338:The mindset assessment asks questions that measure characteristics such as awareness, helpfulness, accountability, alignment, collaboration, self-correction, coordination, inclusivity, generosity, transparency, results focus, openness, appreciation, recognition, empowerment, initiative, engagement, and safety. Looking at these various elements and averaging results across industries, we have found that people rate their colleagues in their organizations at an average of 4.8 on the continuum and themselves at 6.8, which is to say that individuals rate themselves as 40 percent better than the rest of the people in their organizations across these characteristics. ~ The Arbinger Institute, #NFDB
339:We should not forget that before being inscribed in Western consciousness as the principle of quantification, harmony, and classical non-existence, Greek measurement was an immense social and polymorphous practice of assessment, quantification, establishing equivalences, and the search for appropriate proportions and distributions.
We can see how introducing measure is linked to a whole problem of peasant indebtedness, the transfer of agricultural properties, the settlement of debts, equivalence between foodstuff or manufactured objects, urbanization, and the establishment of a State form.
The institution of money appears at the heart of this practice of measurement. ~ Michel Foucault,#NFDB
340:The majority of the employees here are civilians," explained my Alderman guide/protector/companion/would-be-executioner as we strode without a word to the security guards through the foyer towards the lifts. "They conduct themselves within perfectly standard financial services and regulations. There is one specialist suboperational department catering to the financing of more...unusual extra-capital ventures, and the executive assets who operate it have to undergo a rigorous level of training, psyche evaluation, personality assessment, and team operational analyses."
We stared at him, and said, "We barely understood the little words."
"No," he replied, "I didn't think you would. ~ Kate Griffin,#NFDB
341:If we take the position that an assessment that veganism is morally preferable to vegetarianism is not possible because we are all “on our own journey,” then moral assessment becomes completely impossible or is speciesist. It is impossible because if we are all “on our own journey,” then there is nothing to say to the racist, sexist, anti-semite, homophobe, etc. If we say that those forms of discrimination are morally bad, but, with respect to animals, we are all “on our own journey” and we cannot make moral assessments about, for instance, dairy consumption, then we are simply being speciesist and not applying the same moral analysis to nonhumans that we apply to the human context. ~ Gary L Francione, #NFDB
342:Living with cancer has forced me to consciously jettison the myth of omnipresence, of believing—or loosely asserting—that I can do anything, along with any dangerous illusion of immortality. Neither of these unscrutinized defenses is a solid base for either political activism or personal struggle. But in their place, another kind of power is growing, tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing. Ann open-eyed assessment and appreciation of what I can and do accomplish, using who I am and who I most wish myself to be. To stretch as far as I can go and relish what is satisfying rather than what is sad. Building a strong and elegant pathway toward transition. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
343:To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning. We have to 'read' what we feel and seem to see, and ask what those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to the reliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice could serve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand critical examination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of a conclusion based mainly on signals…We also have to ask what kinds of reasoning should count in the assessment of ethical and political concepts such as justice and injustice. ~ Amartya Sen, #NFDB
344:Have you ever had a dream in whig, having spied a deadly snake at your feet, you suddenly begin to see snakes everywhere - suddenly realize, in fact, that you're surrounded by them?"
Reynie was surprised. "I have had that dream. It's a nightmare."
"Indeed. And it strikes me as being rather like when a person first realizes the extent of wickedness in the world. That vision can become all-consuming - and in a way, it, too, is a nightmare, by which I mean that it is not quite a proper assessment of the state of things. For someone as observant as you, Reynie, deadly serpents always catch the eye. But if you find that serpents are all you see, you may not be looking hard enough. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart,#NFDB
345:We imagine we’ll hear history when it calls. When it doesn’t, we return to our daily lives, our moral mettle still intact. But maybe history doesn’t call, or maybe you have to be listening closely to hear it. To prioritize diversity over perceived merit—the colorblind assessment of ability that has never really been colorblind at all—is to recognize that strategic imperatives can’t be the sole benchmark by which we distribute society’s prizes. There’s an increasing sense—among the millennials who fill our lecture halls, but out in the rougher world of cubicles and delivery vans and hospital waiting rooms as well—that it’s not enough to be right, or profitable, or talented. You must also be just. It’s ~ Joichi Ito, #NFDB
346:You say she’ll sail rings around a wolfship?” Stig nodded determinedly. “That’s right.” “Do you include my wolfship in that assessment?” Erak asked. Stig hesitated. He glanced sidelong at Hal and saw the minuscule shake of his head, the warning look in his eye. “Ah . . . of course not, Oberjarl.” Erak nodded, satisfied. “Thought as much.” He nudged the yardarm with his toe again. “Looks flimsy,” he said, then turned and stepped easily down the boarding ramp, moving nimbly in spite of his bulk. When Erak was safely out of earshot, Stig turned to his friend. “Of course, she’ll sail rings around Wolfwind,” he said. “Then why didn’t you tell him that?” Hal asked, grinning. “I like my head where it is. ~ John Flanagan, #NFDB
347:To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning.
We have to 'read' what we feel and seem to see, and ask what those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to the reliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice could serve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand critical examination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of a
conclusion based mainly on signals...We also have to ask what kinds of reasoning should count in the assessment of ethical and political concepts such as justice and injustice. ~ Amartya Sen,#NFDB
348:A 2001 study of adolescent school shooters, prompted in part by the massacre at Columbine High School, resulted in two interesting findings. The first is that 25 percent of the thirty-four teenage shooters they looked at participated in pairs. This is different from adult rampage killers, who most often act alone. Dr. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and expert on targeted violence and threat assessment, authored the study. He told me that these deadly dyads mean it’s absolutely critical for parents to pay attention to the dynamics between kids and their friends. The second finding from his study: typically, one of the two kids was a psychopath, and the other one suggestible, dependent, and depressed. ~ Sue Klebold, #NFDB
349:Abraham Maslow became a towering figure in my life. He was the inspiration for me to look at psychology from a 180-degree-turnabout position. Rather than studying what was weak, infirm, or limited in clients and make an assessment based on overcoming ailments, I began looking for the highest qualities of self-actualization and encouraging clients—and ultimately readers and listeners—to seek their own innate greatness and aspire to these pinnacles. I reasoned that if some among us could be self-actualized, then so could I and anyone else who understood that it was possible. This became a major focus of my professional life and the compass I set for myself to live the principles that Maslow delineated in his writing. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
350:When bad things happen to good people, we have a problem. We know consciously that life is unfair, but unconsciously we see the world through the lens of reciprocity. The downfall of an evil man (in our biased and moralistic assessment) is no puzzle: He had it coming to him. But when the victim was virtuous, we struggle to make sense of his tragedy. At an intuitive level, we all believe in karma, the Hindu notion that people reap what they sow. The psychologist Mel Lerner has demonstrated that we are so motivated to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get that we often blame the victim of a tragedy, particularly when we can’t achieve justice by punishing a perpetrator or compensating the victim. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
351:I spotted Delilah instantly. She was one of a handful of people quietly attending the room’s lone baccarat table, and the only non-Asian in sight. She was dressed plainly, in black pants and a black, shoulderless top. Her hair was pulled back and I saw no signs of makeup or jewelry. If she’d been trying to downplay her looks, though, she hadn’t been notably successful. I checked the usual hotspots and saw nothing that set off any alarms. So far, my assessment that she wouldn’t yet do anything precipitous seemed correct. But it was too soon to really know. After all, the casino, with its cameras, guards, and other forms of security, would have made a poor place for an ambush. An attack, if one were to come, would happen later. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
352:Vhalla Yarl, the Windwalker." Her name on the lips of a stranger made her uneasy, and Vhalla sat back onto her feet to assess him with equal interest. "I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't you."
She laughed bitterly, remembering Elecia's first unappreciative assessment of her months ago. "Sorry to disappoint."
The man tilted his head. "You show up as if you materialize from the wind itself, to save the life of the crown prince whom you jumped off the side of the Pass in an attempt to save. You're unassuming, you're filthy, and you're soaked in what I can only presume to be the blood of our enemies." A grin slowly spread across Jax's face, like that of a rabid beast. "Who said anything about being disappointed? ~ Elise Kova,#NFDB
353:I can’t fathom the transformation of a basket of food to accommodate a multitude (heck, I’m not even sure how our toaster works), but I can see the boundless compassion of the open table and endeavor to re-create that on whatever spot I stand at any given moment and with the people in my midst. Jesus feeds people. That’s what he does. And as striking as what he does is, equally revelatory is what he doesn’t do here. There’s no altar call, no spiritual gifts assessment, no membership class, no moral screening, no litmus test to verify everyone’s theology and to identify those worthy enough to earn a seat at the table. Their hunger and Jesus’ love for them alone, nothing else, make them worthy. This is a serious gut check for us. ~ John Pavlovitz, #NFDB
354:There is a biblical benchmark I now use. We will refer to this criterion for every hard question, big idea, topic, assessment of our own obedience, every “should” or “should not” and “will” or “will not” we ascribe to God, every theological sound bite. Here it is: If it isn’t also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn’t true. If a sermon promises health and wealth to the faithful, it isn’t true, because that theology makes God an absolute monster who only blesses rich westerners and despises Christians in Africa, India, China, South America, Russia, rural Appalachia, inner-city America, and everywhere else a sincere believer remains poor. If it isn’t also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn’t true. ~ Jen Hatmaker, #NFDB
355:Three months after Columbine, the FBI organized a major summit on school shooters in Leesburg, Virginia. The Bureau assembled some of the world’s leading psychologists, including Dr. Hare. Near the end of the conference, Dr. Fuselier stepped up to the microphone and gave a thorough briefing on the minds of the two killers. “It looks like Eric Harris was a budding young psychopath,” he concluded. The room stirred. A renowned psychiatrist in the front row moved to speak. Here it comes, Fuselier thought. This guy is going to nitpick the assessment to death. “I don’t think he was a budding young psychopath,” the psychiatrist said. “What’s your objection?” “I think he was a full-blown psychopath.” His colleagues agreed. Eric Harris was textbook. ~ Dave Cullen, #NFDB
356:Making that possible involved creating relationships with several partners who helped Medtronic accomplish customers’ jobs. “Through the assessment of Healthy Heart for All, Medtronic understood the need for partners in different stages of the patient care pathway who can be a strong support in removing the barriers to treatment access,” says Dasgupta. “In this case, partners with capabilities in financing, administration of loans, screening and counselling of patients played a major role. With programs like Healthy Heart for All, Medtronic is delivering greater value to patients, healthcare professionals and hospitals. And it is this value which brings true differentiation where product differentiation may not be easy to demonstrate. ~ Clayton M Christensen, #NFDB
357:We live in an age of scepticism where the power of words as persuaders is continually and increasingly questioned. From advertising slogans and their glib promises to the endless examples of broken promises and failed utopias of political rhetoric, or indeed the murderous promises inspired and fulfilled on the basis of such rhetoric, we take words with a large pinch of reasonable doubt. We reach for alternative forms of corroboration. However, when other proofs are absent we are thrown back to the phrase that once ruled the London Stock Exchange: 'My word is my bond'. An assessment of human nature - the quality, character and actions of a person - is what determines the probability whether verbal claims are credible. The word is indeed our last resort. ~ Ziauddin Sardar, #NFDB
358:This embarrassing episode remains one of the most instructive experiences of my professional life. I eventually learned three lessons from it. The first was immediately apparent: I had stumbled onto a distinction between two profoundly different approaches to forecasting, which Amos and I later labeled the inside view and the outside view. The second lesson was that our initial forecasts of about two years for the completion of the project exhibited a planning fallacy. Our estimates were closer to a best-case scenario than to a realistic assessment. I was slower to accept the third lesson, which I call irrational perseverance: the folly we displayed that day in failing to abandon the project. Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
359:The same day that the Bedayev warehouses were destroyed, Hitler’s high command called in a nutritionist, Ernst Ziegelmeyer, to discuss the food situation in Leningrad. Ziegelmeyer made a studied assessment of the rationing that would probably go into effect in the city. He calculated that the population would starve to death quite soon. His recommendation to the Führer, therefore, was that the German army should not invade the city at all but simply wait in a choking noose around it. “It is not worth risking the lives of our troops. The Leningraders will die anyway. It is essential not to let a single person through our front line. The more of them that stay there, the sooner they will die, and then we will enter the city without trouble, without losing a single German soldier. ~ M T Anderson, #NFDB
360:Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team. They must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team’s performance. Identifying weaknesses, good leaders seek to strengthen them and come up with a plan to overcome challenges. The best teams anywhere, like the SEAL Teams, are constantly looking to improve, add capability, and push the standards higher. It starts with the individual and spreads to each of the team members until this becomes the culture, the new standard. The recognition that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders facilitates Extreme Ownership and enables leaders to build high-performance teams that dominate on any battlefield, literal or figurative. ~ Jocko Willink, #NFDB
361:The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach? [...] Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away. ~ Thomas Frank, #NFDB
362:And what is your assessment?” “The Nazarene seems to have power to sway the masses with delusion, make them believe his magic tricks. He speaks of the visitation of Yahweh, the Day of the Lord and coming judgment. But he does not tolerate violence, and prepares no arms.” “Does he claim to be Messiah?” Demas said, “Yes and no. He gives many hints that it is so. But he will not come out and claim it in public.” Barabbas was not comforted by the assurance. He still appeared agitated. “And what of Simon?” “He did not speak a single ill word of you when we were with him. He does not seem to be against you.” Gestas added, “Jesus teaches, ‘He that is not against you is for you.’ I heard him say that if anyone wanted to be his disciple, they must deny themselves, pick up their cross, and follow him. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
363:Gale didn't say, "Katniss will pick whoever it will break her heart to give up," or even "whoever she can't live without." Those would have implied I was motivated by a kind of passion. But my best friend predicts I will choose the person "I can't survive without." There's not the least indication that love, desire, or even compatibility will sway me. I'll just conduct an unfeeling assessment of what my potential mates can offer me.
As if in the end, it will be the question of whether a baker or a hunter will extend my longevity the most. It's a horrible thing for Gale to say, for Peeta not to refute. Especially when every emotion I have has been taken or exploited by the Capitol or the rebels. At the moment, the choice would be simple. I can survive just fine without either of them. ~ Suzanne Collins,#NFDB
364:The umbrella assertion made by Team B—and the most inflammatory—was that the previous National Intelligence Estimates “substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat.” Soviet military leaders weren’t simply trying to defend their territory and their people; they were readying a First Strike option, and the US intelligence community had missed it. What led to this “grave and dangerous flaw” in threat assessment, according to Team B, was an overreliance on hard technical facts, and a lamentable tendency to downplay “the large body of soft data.” This “soft” data, the ideological leader of Team B, Richard Pipes, would later say, included “his deep knowledge of the Russian soul. ~ Rachel Maddow, #NFDB
365:Didn't your mother ever warn you what can happen to young ladies who wander into young men's private bedrooms during social gatherings?" Jesse asked, as he hauled Zack Farhat off me. "It can be bad for their health."
"Oh, sure." Now that I could breathe again, I sat up and took a careful assessment of my rib bone situation. None appeared to be broken, but there were going to be bruises for sure. I wouldn't be swimming much for the next few weeks. "Blame the victim. That's what everybody does."
"I didn't mean you, querida, Jesse said. His dark-eyed gaze, generally so full of warmth - except, of course, when he was thinking about his time as a member of the undead - was as cold with contempt as I could ever remember seeing it, and it was focused on Zack. "I meant it can be unhealthy for the young men. ~ Meg Cabot,#NFDB
366:I believe that we all have the potential to solve problems and express ourselves creatively. What stands in our way are these hidden barriers—the misconceptions and assumptions that impede us without our knowing it. The issue of what is hidden, then, is not just an abstraction to be bandied about as an intellectual exercise. The Hidden—and our acknowledgement of it—is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress: clinging to what works, fearing change, and deluding ourselves about our roles in our own success. Candor, safety, research, self-assessment, and protecting the new are all mechanisms we can use to confront the unknown and to keep the chaos and fear to a minimum. These concepts don’t necessarily make anything easier, but they can help us uncover hidden problems and, thus, enable us to address them. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
367:Metaphysical doctrines can also assist in the elimination of false implications in biological theories, especially those of the theory of evolution. Throughout the world today particularly in the Orient where there are still societies that remain faithful to their religious principles and the social structure based upon them, men are asked to evolve and change simply because evolution is in the nature of things and is inevitable. A more objective assessment of the findings of biology would insist that as long as man has been living on earth he has not evolved at all; nor has his natural environment changed in any way. The same plants and animals are still born, grow, wither and die and regenerate themselves except for the unfortunate species that modem man who believes himself to belong to the process of evolution has made extinct. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
368:When the tragedies of others become for us diversions, sad stories with which to enthrall our friends, interesting bits of data to toss out at cocktail parties, a means of presenting a pose of political concern, or whatever…when this happens we commit the gravest of sins, condemn ourselves to ignominy, and consign the world to a dangerous course. We begin to justify our casual overview of pain and suffering by portraying ourselves as do-gooders incapacitated by the inexorable forces of poverty, famine, and war. “What can I do?” we say, “I’m only one person, and these things are beyond my control. I care about the world’s trouble, but there are no solutions.” Yet no matter how accurate this assessment, most of us are relying on it to be true, using it to mask our indulgence, our deep-seated lack of concern, our pathological self-involvement. ~ Lucius Shepard, #NFDB
369:Six-Pack didn't despise George W. Bush to the degree that Ketchum did, but she thought the president was a smirking twerp and a dumbed-down daddy's boy, and she agreed with Ketchum's assessment that Bush would be as worthless as wet crap in even the smallest crisis. If a fight broke out between two small dogs, for example, Ketchum claimed that Bush would call the fire department and ask them to bring a hose; then the president would position himself at a safe distance from the dogfight, and wait for the firemen to show up. The part Pam liked best about this assessment was that Ketchum said the president would instantly look self-important, and would appear to be actively involved--that is, once the firefighters and their hose arrived, and provided there was anything remaining of the mess the two dogs might have made of each other in the interim. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
370:By any honest assessment of where we are as a party, without a major course correction, we are simply on the way out. The demographic picture of America is rapidly changing, and we have to change with it. George W. Bush got 56 percent of the white vote, and won. Mitt Romney got 59 percent of the white vote, and lost. Every four years in this country, the electorate gets about two percentage points less white; as an increasingly old and increasingly white party, we are skidding with each passing election toward irrelevance in terms of appealing to a broad electorate. We hold out our hand, expecting our share of nonwhite votes, and yet we give these Americans too few reasons to come our way. Instead, we demonize them, marginalize them, and blame them for our country's problems. We all knew of this before the last election, but we quickly set it aside for the sugar high of populism, nativism ~ Jeff Flake, #NFDB
371:In 1995, when Steve Jobs was trying to convince us that we should go public, one of his key arguments was that we would eventually make a film that failed at the box office, and we needed to be prepared, financially, for that day. Going public would give us the capital to fund our own projects and, thus, to have more say about where we were headed, but it would also give us a buffer that could sustain us through failure. Steve’s feeling was that Pixar’s survival could not depend solely on the performance of each and every movie. The underlying logic of his reasoning shook me: We were going to screw up, it was inevitable. And we didn’t know when or how. We had to prepare, then, for an unknown problem—a hidden problem. From that day on, I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light, a process that would require what might seem like an uncommon commitment to self-assessment. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
372:In 1972, the psychologist Irving Janis defined groupthink as, “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.” Groupthink most commonly affects homogenous, close-knit communities that are overly insulated from internal and external criticism, and that perceive themselves as different from or under attack by outsiders. Its symptoms include censorship of dissent, rejection or rationalization of criticisms, the conviction of moral superiority, and the demonization of those who hold opposing beliefs. It typically leads to the incomplete or inaccurate assessment of information, the failure to seriously consider other possible options, a tendency to make rash decisions, and the refusal to reevaluate or alter those decisions once they’ve been made. ~ Kathryn Schulz, #NFDB
373:If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot the unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB
374:If you were to zoom way out and look at the six steps of my forecasting method, you would see this duality in play. It’s not a happy accident. Scientific and technological advances depend on both ingenuity and rigorous evaluation. The future of our culture—how we communicate, work, shop, play games, and take care of ourselves—necessarily intersects with the future of science and technology. Daydreaming alone won’t bring new ideas to market; ideas require process engineering and budgeting before they can become tangible. However, too much emphasis on logic and linear thinking will kill moonshots while they’re still on the whiteboard. That is why it’s important to afford equal treatment to each hemisphere, alternating between broad creative thinking and more pragmatic, analytical assessment. When executed completely, the forces are balanced, allowing for innovation while ensuring a check-and-balance system for the future. ~ Amy Webb, #NFDB
375:Islamism offers an easy answer, a ready exegesis far more comforting than the difficult-to-stomach but accurate assessment that the West embraces consensual government, free-market economics, capitalism, property rights, meritocracy, equality between the sexes, inclusiveness for minorities, and religious tolerance — and that such values in the end result in greater material wealth, more innovation, better technology, and in general more personal freedom. The Islamist objects that the poverty and general wretchedness of the Middle East do not derive from self-inflicted pathologies like autocracy, statism, fundamentalism, collectivism, endemic tribalism, misogyny, or intolerance; rather, they are caused by aggressive foreign enemies, Americans and Jews in particular. At home, traitors, heretics, apostates, and atheists have weakened Islamic spiritual life, in pursuit of a tawdry covetousness of Western trinkets and shibboleths. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
376:Given that we all agree, in principle, that postmortems are good for us, I’m always struck by how much people dread them. Most feel that they’ve learned what they could during the execution of the project, so they’d just as soon move on. Problems that arose are frequently personal, so most are eager to avoid revisiting them. Who looks forward to a forum for being second-guessed? People, in general, would rather talk about what went right than what went wrong, using the occasion to give additional kudos to their most deserving team members. Left to our own devices, we avoid unpleasantness. It isn’t just postmortems, though: In general, people are resistant to self-assessment. Companies are bad at it, too. Looking inward, to them, often boils down to this: “We are successful, so what we are doing must be correct.” Or the converse: “We failed, so what we did was wrong.” This is shallow. Do not be cowed into missing this opportunity. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
377:candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck.” This idea—that all the movies we now think of as brilliant were, at one time, terrible—is a hard concept for many to grasp. But think about how easy it would be for a movie about talking toys to feel derivative, sappy, or overtly merchandise-driven. Think about how off-putting a movie about rats preparing food could be, or how risky it must’ve seemed to start WALL-E with 39 dialogue-free minutes. We dare to attempt these stories, but we don’t get them right on the first pass. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
378:Franklin’s diplomatic triumph would help seal the course of the Revolution. It would also alter the world’s balances of power, not just between France and England, but also—though France certainly did not intend it to—between republicanism and monarchy. “Franklin had won,” writes Carl Van Doren, “a diplomatic campaign equal in results to Saratoga.” The Yale historian Edmund Morgan goes even further, calling it “the greatest diplomatic victory the United States has ever achieved.” With the possible exception of the creation of the NATO alliance, that assessment may be true, though it partly points up the paucity of American successes over the years at bargaining tables, whether in Versailles after World War I or in Paris at the end of the Vietnam War. At the very least, it can be said that Franklin’s triumph permitted America the possibility of an outright victory in its war for independence while conceding no lasting entanglements that would encumber it as a new nation. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
379:Set an optimistic but reasonable goal and define it clearly. ■Write it down. ■Discuss your goal with a colleague (this makes it harder to wimp out). ■Carry the written goal into the negotiation. SECTION II: SUMMARY Summarize and write out in just a couple of sentences the known facts that have led up to the negotiation. You’re going to have to have something to talk about beyond a self-serving assessment of what you want. And you had better be ready to respond with tactical empathy to your counterpart’s arguments; unless they’re incompetent, the other party will come prepared to argue an interpretation of the facts that favors them. Get on the same page at the outset. You have to clearly describe the lay of the land before you can think about acting in its confines. Why are you there? What do you want? What do they want? Why? You must be able to summarize a situation in a way that your counterpart will respond with a “That’s right.” If they don’t, you haven’t done it right. ~ Chris Voss, #NFDB
380:The most significant innovation in Chisholm’s overhaul of the office involves an “early intervention” program, which begins after a defendant is arrested but before arraignment. Each defendant is given an eight-question assessment, which can be conducted in about fifteen minutes and is compared to the information on the rap sheet and in the police report. The questions include: “Two or more prior adult convictions?” “Arrested under age sixteen?” “Currently unemployed?” “Some criminal friends?” A low score can lead to an offer of “diversion”—a kind of unofficial probation that, if successfully completed, leaves the individual without a criminal record. A high score leads to a second, more detailed, fifty-four-question assessment. The questions include: “Ever walked away/escaped from a halfway house?” “Were you ever suspended or expelled from school?” “Does your financial situation contribute to your stress?” “Tell me the best thing about your supervisor/teacher.” Results of the assessment may ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
381:Trail of Tears, “these forced migrations” whose “fearful evils…are impossible to imagine…. I have witnessed evils,” Tocqueville admits a couple of paragraphs later, “I would find it impossible to relate.”* Regarding the plight of Indians in the United States, words practically fail Tocqueville. As for black people, they seem less fated for extinction than Native Americans, but their situation is nevertheless dire: black people, enslaved or free, “only constitute an unhappy remnant, a poor little wandering tribe, lost in the midst of an immense nation which owns all the land.” Such an assessment seems strange, if not ridiculous, to the twenty-first-century ear, since “this poor little wandering tribe” comprised more than two million people, more than 18 percent of the total population. Tocqueville very clearly realizes that slavery damages southern white people as well as the southern economy. Because of slavery, southern white people’s customs and character compare poorly with those of other Americans. ~ Nell Irvin Painter, #NFDB
382:… Looking at her, I think I know better what romantic love is.”
… she asked, “What is it?”
“It is parental love,” he answered thoughtfully. “Wanting to protect and keep the other person safe. As well as the love of friendship - esteeming the other person, even desiring each other’s company beyond all others. And it is lust,” he said, meeting her eyes, and was rewarded with seeing them darken, her breath becoming slightly unsteady, one little word jerking her out of her clinical assessment. He smiled, a predatory, seductive grin. “The physical needing of the other person, the quickened pulse, the sweaty heat.” His hand, which still rested on hers, began slowly moving, his fingers dancing over her skin. “Combining them makes the result greater than its individual parts. Because it produces something else. It creates … a steadiness. A strength. I can’t explain it well - being only an outside observer - but I only know that out of my friends' relationships, my sister‘s marriage is the epitome of grace. ~ Kate Noble,#NFDB
383:If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get my children to believe.”“I will discipline the hell out of my children.”“It’s my job to ensure that they do what is right.”“If I do nothing else, I will send children out into the world who are prepared to live right.”“After I’m done with him, he’ll never even think of doing that again.” The assessment in these statements that children need to change is right. The deep desire for that change which motivates a parent is right. The commitment to work for that change is right. Then what is wrong with each of these statements? Each of them assumes power on the part of parents that no parent has, and that assumption creates all kinds of parenting trouble. If you are going to be what God has designed you to be as a parent and do what he’s called you to do, you must confess one essential thing. This confession has the power to change much about the way you act and react toward your children. It is vital that you believe and admit that you have no power whatsoever to change your child. ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
384:In the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the DOD presented its long-range assessment of United States military readiness and plans for the future. By statute, the National Defense Panel (NDP), a nonpartisan ten-member body appointed by Congress, is required to review the QDR’s adequacy. The panel concluded that under the Obama administration’s military plan “there is a growing gap between the strategic objectives the U.S. military is expected to achieve and the resources required to do so.”71 The significant funding shortfall is “disturbing if not dangerous in light of the fact that global threats and challenges are rising, including a troubling pattern of territorial assertiveness and regional intimidation on China’s part, the recent aggression of Russia in Ukraine, nuclear proliferation on the part of North Korea and Iran, a serious insurgency in Iraq that both reflects and fuels the broader sectarian conflicts in the region, the civil war in Syria, and civil strife in the larger Middle East and throughout Africa. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
385:There are many things I would like to believe in, because they would accord life coherence. One of them is God. Another is the notion that on the brink of death one’s life dances before one’s eyes in kaleidoscopic fragments: dramas, traumas, transcendent highs, troughs of gloom, or the crystallize moments that encapsulate a certain mood on a certain day, like - for me - the smell of forsythia blossom at nursery school, or a turn of phrase - “ca va tourner au vinaigre “ - used by my mother, bitterly, to someone on the phone, or the pop of the dog fleas Pierre and I picked from our terrier and flicked onto the barbecue, or the appalling intimacy of my first kiss, or the body blow of my mother’s death, or the chaos of Pierre’s wedding, or the aching realization that dawned when my father said “Mesopotamia” instead of “kitchen”, or the night I shouted at Alex and he swerved, or the morning the doctors gave me the final assessment of my paraplegia and, for want of anything better to do, I glanced at the clock and noted that it was 11:23. ~ Liz Jensen, #NFDB
386:One day over breakfast, a medical resident asked how Dr. Apgar would make a systematic assessment of a newborn. “That’s easy,” she replied. “You would do it like this.” Apgar jotted down five variables (heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone, and color) and three scores (0, 1, or 2, depending on the robustness of each sign). Realizing that she might have made a breakthrough that any delivery room could implement, Apgar began rating infants by this rule one minute after they were born. A baby with a total score of 8 or above was likely to be pink, squirming, crying, grimacing, with a pulse of 100 or more—in good shape. A baby with a score of 4 or below was probably bluish, flaccid, passive, with a slow or weak pulse—in need of immediate intervention. Applying Apgar’s score, the staff in delivery rooms finally had consistent standards for determining which babies were in trouble, and the formula is credited for an important contribution to reducing infant mortality. The Apgar test is still used every day in every delivery room. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
387:This emphasis calls into question some of the most ingrained insights into the history of the modern world—for example, conceptualizing the nineteenth century, as is so often done, as an age of “bourgeois civilization,” in contrast with the twentieth century, which historian Eric Hobsbawm has termed the “age of catastrophe.”19 An assessment such as this can only be derived from a vision of the world that focuses its moral judgments on Europe. Looked at from the perspective of much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, one can argue just the opposite—that the nineteenth century was an age of barbarity and catastrophe, as slavery and imperialism devastated first one pocket of the globe and then another. It is the twentieth century, by contrast, that saw the weakening of imperial powers and thus allowed more of the world’s people to determine their own futures and shake off the shackles of colonial domination. Without its Eurocentric distortions, decolonialization would be at the very center of the narrative we tell about the twentieth century ~ Sven Beckert, #NFDB
388:Was she terribly ravishing in her underclothes?” Livia asked craftily.
“Yes,” Marcus said without thinking, and then scowled. “I mean, no. That is, I didn’t look at her long enough to make an assessment of her charms. If she has any.”
Livia bit the inside of her lower lip to keep from laughing. “Come, Marcus…you are a healthy man of thirty-five—and you didn’t take one tiny peep at Miss Bowman standing there in her drawers?”
“I don’t peep, Livia. I either take a good look at something, or I don’t. Peeping is for children or deviants.”
She gave him a deeply pitying glance. “Well, I’m dreadfully sorry that you had to endure such a trying experience. We can only hope that Miss Bowman will stay fully clothed in your presence during this visit, to avoid shocking your refined sensibilities once again.”
Marcus frowned in response to the mockery. “I doubt she will.”
“Do you mean that you doubt she will stay fully clothed, or you doubt she will shock you?”
“Enough, Livia,” he growled, and she giggled. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
389:With the rise of molecular genetics, it has become possible to search for possible changes (mutations, polymorphisms) in target genes. Much effort has gone into investigating variations in genes that contribute to serotonin transmission, because serotonin-related drugs have antidepressant and anxiolytic properties. This assumes, however, that the treatment mechanism is the same mechanism that gives rise to the disorder.53 Although this is consistent with the old chemical imbalance hypothesis, it is not a conclusion that should simply be accepted without careful assessment. Nevertheless, studies of the genetic control of serotonin have found interesting results. For example, people with a certain variant (polymorphism) of a gene controlling a protein involved in serotonin transmission are more reactive to threatening stimuli, and this hyperreactivity is associated with increased amygdala activity during the threat.54 Further, it has been reported that this variant of the gene can account for 7 percent to 9 percent of the inheritance of anxiety.55 ~ Joseph E LeDoux, #NFDB
390:In his great book How to Do Things with Words (1962), J.L. Austin considers the apparently simple sentence "France is hexagonal." He asks if this is true or false, a question that makes perfect sense if the job of a sentence is to be faithful to the world. His answer is that it depends. If you are a general contemplating a coming battle, saying that France is hexagonal might help you assess various military options of defense and attack; it would be a good sentence. But if you are a geographer charged with the task of mapping France's contours, saying that France is hexagonal might cost you your union card; a greater degree of detail and fineness of scale is required of mapmakers. "France is hexagonal," Austin explains, is true "for certain intents and purposes" and false or inadequate or even nonsensical for others. It is, he says, a matter of the "dimension of assessment" -- that is, a matter of what is the "right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions. ~ Stanley Fish, #NFDB
391:It is vital to acknowledge the new reality before taking any steps to change the existing policies. The world is not the same anymore. Tackling religion-based terrorism is perhaps one, if not the most serious threat the world face in the 21st century. Unfortunately, more terror attacks like the ones in San Bernardino, Brussels and Paris are expected to occur. While those attacks were a reminder of the challenges that lay ahead, they exposed the need to have an improved early warning system that may ultimately save civilian lives. Such a system should take into account the shortcomings of the current warning frameworks and evaluate the usefulness of warnings generated by improved models that would cover a broad range of attacks, larger geographic areas within the country in question and a wide range of potential attack scenarios. The system is likely to facilitate well informed decisions on the assessment of information gathered from different sources. In this vein, finding a balance between protecting human rights and ensuring national security is key. ~ Widad Akreyi, #NFDB
392:An economically weakened and isolationist America will call into question the Pax Americana, whereby the United States oversees international peace and security, and thus expose the world to the unpredictable whims and values of nondemocratic powers. These are not the solutions the world needs. Creating sustainable economic growth in the twenty-first century requires no less than aggressively retooling history’s greatest engine of growth, democratic capitalism itself. This requires a clear-eyed assessment of how ineffective the system is in its current state, politically as well as economically—and then implementing the repairs that will yield better outcomes. Too much is at stake for us to remain wedded to the status quo. The ominous rise of protectionism and nationalism throughout the world portend that the global economy and community are eroding already. The only way forward is to preserve the best of liberal democratic capitalism and to repair the worst. We cannot cling to past practices and old ideologies simply for their own sake. Doing nothing is no choice at all. ~ Dambisa Moyo, #NFDB
393:When I was little, I didn’t understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, “Donna who?” I would say, “Donna Gilbert.” I thought close was good enough, that sloppiness was generally built into the language. I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Crosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday were the same person. That Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy were the same person. It was a shock for me quite late in life to discover that Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau were not even related. Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive the slightest reshuffling of letters. One gust of wind and Santa became Satan. A slip of the pen and pears turned into pearls. A little interior decorating and the world became her twold, an ungrammatical and unkind assessment of an aging aunt in a singles bar. Add a d to poor, you got droop. It was that way in biology, too. Add a chromosome, get a criminal. Subtract one, get an idiot or a chipmunk. That was the way with things. ~ Lorrie Moore, #NFDB
394:An article in the New York Times concluded that, “Television will never be a serious competitor for radio.” If you’re listening to the radio, you can get on and do other things. To experience television, the Times argued, “People must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen.” Ironically, of course, this was to become the very attraction of the whole system. Nonetheless, it seemed clear to the writer that, “The average American family doesn’t have time for it.” Well, they found time. On average, the average American family went on to squeeze about 25 hours a week from their busy schedules to sit and keep their eyes glued on the television. The fault line in the Times’ assessment of television was to judge it in terms of contemporary cultural values where there seemed to be no place for it. In fact, television was not squeezed into existing American culture: it changed the culture forever. After the arrival of television, the world was never the same place again. Television proved to be a transformative technology, just as print, the steam engine, electricity, the motorcar and others before it had been. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
395:She was surprised because she was Emily, and she did not share Jonathan's frank assessment of coworkers as losers, whiners, bozos, sharks. No, she imagined people were rational and courteous, as she was, and when they proved otherwise, she assumed that she could influence them to become that way. Dangerous thinking. When she was truthful, she expected to hear the truth. Reasonable, she expected reasonable behavior in return. She was young, inventive, fantastically successful. She trusted in the world, believing in poetic justice- that good ideas blossomed and bore fruit, while dangerous schemes were meant to wither on the vine. She had passions and petty jealousies like everybody else, but she was possessed of a serene rationality. At three, she had listened while her mother sang "Greensleeves" in the dark, and she'd asked: "Why are you singing 'Greensleeves' when my nightgown is blue?" Then Gillian had changed the song to "Bluesleeves," and Emily had drifted off. Those songs were over now, Gillian long gone. Despite this loss- because of it- Emily was still that girl, seeking consonance and symmetry, logic, light. ~ Allegra Goodman, #NFDB
396:Whom could I fear in the universe where my Mother is matriarch? I live with perfect ease upon her estate, indivisible awareness and bliss. I am her direct tenant, free from formaility and hierarchy. There is no payment of rent for this sanctuary, this garden of nonduality, its value beyond assessment by the mind. Nor can my sacred abode be sold at auction, for there are no owners and nothing to own. The manager of Mother's holdings, Lord Shiva, transcends every limited conception and transaction. There is no disharmony or injustice here, for there is no division, no separation. Mother does not impose the heavy tax of religious obligation. My only responsibility of stewardship is constant inward remembrance, eternally breathing Kali, Kali, Kali. This mad poet lover, born directly from Divine Mother, cherishes one consuming desire: to purchase her diamond paradise of delight with the boundless treasure of pure love and give it away freely to all beings. [1898.jpg] -- from Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment, Translated by Lex Hixon
~ Ramprasad, Its value beyond assessment by the mind
,#NFDB
397:If we feel ourselves valuable, then we will feel our time to be valuable, and if we feel our time to be valuable, then we will want to use it well. The financial analyst who procrastinated did not value her time. If she had, she would not have allowed herself to spend most of her day so unhappily and unproductively. It was not without consequence for her that throughout her childhood she was “farmed out” during all school vacations to live with paid foster parents although her parents could have taken care of her perfectly well had they wanted to. They did not value her. They did not want to care for her. So she grew up feeling herself to be of little value, not worth caring for; therefore she did not care for herself. She did not feel she was worth disciplining herself. Despite the fact that she was an intelligent and competent woman she required the most elementary instruction in self-discipline because she lacked a realistic assessment of her own worth and the value of her own time. Once she was able to perceive her time as being valuable, it naturally followed that she wanted to organize it and protect it and make maximum use ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
398:Jobs and Wozniak had no personal assets, but Wayne (who worried about a global financial Armageddon) kept gold coins hidden in his mattress. Because they had structured Apple as a simple partnership rather than a corporation, the partners would be personally liable for the debts, and Wayne was afraid potential creditors would go after him. So he returned to the Santa Clara County office just eleven days later with a “statement of withdrawal” and an amendment to the partnership agreement. “By virtue of a re-assessment of understandings by and between all parties,” it began, “Wayne shall hereinafter cease to function in the status of ‘Partner.’” It noted that in payment for his 10% of the company, he received $800, and shortly afterward $1,500 more. Had he stayed on and kept his 10% stake, at the end of 2012 it would have been worth approximately $54 billion. Instead he was then living alone in a small home in Pahrump, Nevada, where he played the penny slot machines and lived off his social security check. He later claimed he had no regrets. “I made the best decision for me at the time. Both of them were real whirlwinds, and I knew my stomach and it wasn’t ready for such a ride. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
399:One of the findings of Barbara Sarnecka’s study on risk assessment and moral judgment, the study in which people were asked to evaluate the danger children were in when left alone under different circumstances—and the moral “wrongness” of the parent who had left them—was that when participants were told a father had left his child for a few minutes to run into work, the level of risk to his child was equal to the risk when he left the child because of circumstances beyond his control (when he was struck unconscious by a car). When a woman was running into work, the moral judgment was closer to the level expressed at her going shopping or having an affair. I’ll admit it—I love this finding. I relish the way it makes plain and undeniable something we all sort of know but aren’t supposed to say: We might accept that mothers occasionally want to do other things besides mothering, that they might want to have a career, a social life, a full human existence. But we don’t like it. We hate it, in fact. A father who is distracted for a few minutes by his myriad interests and obligations in the world of adult interactions is being, well, a father. A mother who does the same is failing her children. ~ Kim Brooks, #NFDB
400:And yet, candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck.” This idea—that all the movies we now think of as brilliant were, at one time, terrible—is a hard concept for many to grasp. But think about how easy it would be for a movie about talking toys to feel derivative, sappy, or overtly merchandise-driven. Think about how off-putting a movie about rats preparing food could be, or how risky it must’ve seemed to start WALL-E with 39 dialogue-free minutes. We dare to attempt these stories, but we don’t get them right on the first pass. And this is as it should be. Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process—reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
401:When scientific proposals are brought forward, they are not judged by hunches or gut feelings. Only one standard is relevant: a proposal's ability to explain or predict experimental data and astronomical observations.
Therein lies the singular beauty of science. As we struggle toward deeper understanding, we must give our creative imagination ample room to explore. We must be willing to step outside conventional ideas and established frameworks. But unlike the wealth of other human activities through which the creative impulse is channeled, science supplies a final reckoning, a built-in assessment of what's right and what's not.
A complication of scientific life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is that some of our theoretical ideas have soared past our ability to test or observe. String theory has for some time been the poster child for this situation; the possibility that we're part of a multiverse provides an even more sprawling example. I've laid out a general prescription for how a multiverse proposal might be testable, but at our current level of understanding none of the multiverse theories we've encountered yet meet the criteria. With ongoing research, this situation could greatly improve. ~ Brian Greene,#NFDB
402:tax collector’s booth. Most people in the Roman Empire did not like tax collectors; Jewish people viewed them as traitors. For assessment purposes, tax collectors were allowed to search anything except the person of a Roman lady; any property not properly declared was subject to seizure. In Egypt, tax collectors were sometimes so brutal that they were known to beat up aged women in an attempt to learn where their tax-owing relatives were hiding. Ancient documents reveal that when harvests were bad, on occasion an entire village, hearing that a tax collector was coming, would leave town and start a village somewhere else. People sometimes paid tax collectors bribes to prevent even higher fees being extorted. Some scholars consider Levi a customs officer who would charge tariffs on goods passing through Capernaum. Such tariffs were small by themselves (often less than 3 percent) but drove up the cost of goods because they were multiplied by all the borders they passed through. Customs officers could search possessions; customs income normally went to local governments run by elites who were cooperative with Rome. Others regard Levi as collecting taxes from local residents, likely working especially for agents of Galilee’s ruler, Herod Antipas. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
403:I know it’s early in the party--the huge wine bottle’s still almost full, and the night is young--but I’m impressed at how good everyone looks. And sober. No one’s pink-faced and stumbling, no one’s slurring their words. The groups of people are all mixed. It’s not like the London parties I’ve been to, with boys at one end of the room getting drunk enough to build up the courage to talk to the girls, who are at the other end giggling and pretending to ignore them.
This is impressively grown up.
And Luca was bang-on in his assessment of me. I’m standing here alone, no one coming to talk to me. I think I look pretty nice: I did myself up in my best makeup, dark smoky eyes and red lipstick. I wish I could wear white, like Kendra, who looks amazing in it, but I’m a little too body-conscious for that. Kendra has an athlete’s body, and I don’t. I’m okay with not being really thin, but I’d feel like a great white whale if I wore a white outfit.
Is it a whale? I wonder. Or a shark? I shrug. These are the kind of questions you find yourself pondering when you’re at a fantastic party, all your girlfriends have been snapped up on sight, and you’re busy propping up the drinks table with your bum because no one wants to talk to you. ~ Lauren Henderson,#NFDB
404:most of us move through the day without recognizing the alternatives we have and actively deciding among them. As a result, we give up the feeling of control and mastery that would be ours were we to mindfully create options and then select among them. When we passively move through our day, we set ourselves up to feel like victims. All too often people feel as though they have no choice in situations where others, although no different except in their outlook, actively create their world. It’s a powerful advantage to feel in control, especially in the face of entirely new and different situations, where uncertainty is likely to be greatest. What is the difference between a guess, a prediction, a choice, and a decision? Each characterizes the same process of considering alternatives and selecting one, although a guess deems the affair unimportant, whereas a decision indicates that the outcome is grave. When we are aware that we don’t know how to choose or if we don’t really care what will happen or if we don’t want the responsibility for the outcome, we guess. “I guess I’ll take the prize hidden under the box on the left.” Consider how odd it would sound if one were to say, “Oh well, I guess I’ll get married” or “What the heck, I guess I’ll get divorced.” Our choice of words also clearly conveys an assessment ~ Ellen J Langer, #NFDB
405:Release my horse!" I ordered, infuriated with him and wary of both the large, energetic beast and its rider.
"No," Steldor snapped. "You're coming back with me."
Gripping my reins, he permitted his stallion to move forward in the direction of the city, my mount obediently following. Unwilling to give in to him, I slid from my horse's back.
"I don't think I will return just yet, Your Majesty."
With an exasperated sigh, he dismounted and strode toward me.As he did, he took in my preposterous appearance.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, stopping in his tracks. "You're out in the middle of nowhere, by yourself, dressed like a man and riding your father's horse! Have you gone mad, woman?" He continued to scrutinize me, and his incredulity transformed itself into a frown. "And just where did you get the belt and breeches?" As realizatin struck, he sarcastically added, "Just my luck that you would decide to get into my trousers when I wasn't there yo enjoy it."
My cheeks burned at his crude comment, and had I been a little closer, I would likely have dealt him a second slap. At the same time, I knew his assessment was accurate.
"I was just going for a ride.I have the right to some fresh air," I asserted, hands upon my hips.
Steldor gave a short, scathing laugh. "Not like this you don't.Now get on your horse. ~ Cayla Kluver,#NFDB
406:Vanity metrics wreak havoc because they prey on a weakness of the human mind. In my experience, when the numbers go up, people think the improvement was caused by their actions, by whatever they were working on at the time. That is why it’s so common to have a meeting in which marketing thinks the numbers went up because of a new PR or marketing effort and engineering thinks the better numbers are the result of the new features it added. Finding out what is actually going on is extremely costly, and so most managers simply move on, doing the best they can to form their own judgment on the basis of their experience and the collective intelligence in the room. Unfortunately, when the numbers go down, it results in a very different reaction: now it’s somebody else’s fault. Thus, most team members or departments live in a world where their department is constantly making things better, only to have their hard work sabotaged by other departments that just don’t get it. Is it any wonder these departments develop their own distinct language, jargon, culture, and defense mechanisms against the bozos working down the hall? Actionable metrics are the antidote to this problem. When cause and effect is clearly understood, people are better able to learn from their actions. Human beings are innately talented learners when given a clear and objective assessment. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
407:here we learn that Herod became troubled at the thought that there might be someone else that people would come to regard as their king other than Herod. Herod regarded Jesus as a threat to his power—was his fear unjustified? It is my judgement and this document’s central thesis that Herod was correct in his assessment of Jesus as being a threat to his power—although not just to Herod as an individual but to all that Herod represents, in a word: government ; along with the unholy usurpation, deception and subjugation of people that it necessarily entails. For as I will show, Jesus’s Kingdom is to be the functional opposite of any Earthbound kingdom which has ever existed. And for government, this is the ultimate crime of which Jesus was guilty, and which required His extermination. Here we read of this pivotal act of holy defiance to government, without which there would be no Christ as we know of: Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word; for Herod will seek the young Child to destroy Him.” When he arose, he took the young Child and His mother by night and departed for Egypt, and was there until the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, “Out of Egypt I called My Son. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
408:Time for an exercise, which I shall call 'Say It Out Loud With Miranda'. Please take a moment to sit back, breathe and intone: 'I am taking myself seriously as a woman.' Note your response. If you're reading this on the bus, or surreptitiously in the cinema, or in any other public scenario, then please note other people's responses. (If you are male, and teenaged, and reading this in a room with other teenage boys, then for your own safety I advise you not to participate.)
The rest of you – what comes to mind when you say those words? Is it a fine lady scientist, a ballsy young anarchist with tights on her head or a feminist intellectual from the 1970s nose-down in Simone de Beauvoir? Or is it what I think my friend meant when she said 'woman' which is really 'aesthetic object'. Clothes-horse. Show pony. General beautiful piece of well-groomed stuff that's lovely to look at?
I reckon, to my great dismay, that she did indeed mean the latter. And in saying that I don't take myself seriously in this regard her assessment of me is absolutely bang-on. If taking oneself seriously as a woman means committing to a like of grooming, pumicing, pruning and polishing one's exterior for the benefit of onlookers, then I may as well heave my unwieldy rucksack to the top of a bleak Scottish hill and make my home there under a stone, where I'll fashion shoes out of mud and clothes out of leaves. ~ Miranda Hart,#NFDB
409:Companies use various tests and methodologies. One popular test is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. HubSpot uses a methodology called DISC, which stands for four basic personality types: dominant, influential, steady, and conscientious. You can be a mix of more than one trait—a D with a little bit of C mixed in, for example. The basic idea on all of these things is that you answer a zillion random questions, and a piece of software analyzes your answers to determine what kind of person you are. You do the test online. In the DISC assessment, you’re presented with statements to which you must answer yes or no. I am a neat and orderly person. I like peace and quiet. I am very persuasive. I am a very modest type. A week or so after filling out my questionnaire I am sent to a meeting where I will find out my results. It’s a group encounter, with about twenty people. I’m the only person from my department. The others seem to be mostly from sales. I don’t know any of them. DISC is based on concepts created in 1928 by a psychologist named William Marston, who also created the comic book character Wonder Woman. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about DISC. Other people picked up Marston’s concepts in the 1950s and 1970s, and used them to create personality assessment tests. The ideas are pretty much hogwash, and to make things worse, they are put into practice by people with no psychological training or expertise. At ~ Dan Lyons, #NFDB
410:Gallipoli was one of a series of military ‘Easterner’ adventures launched without proper analysis of the global strategic situation, without consideration of the local tactical situation, ignoring logistical realities, underestimating the strength of the opposition and predicated on a hugely optimistic assessment of the military capabilities of their own troops. Not for nothing is hubris regarded as the ‘English disease’. But the Gallipoli Campaign was a serious matter: vital resources had been drawn away from where it really mattered. The Turks were all but helpless if left on their own. They had tried to launch an ambitious attack across the Sinai Desert on the Suez Canal but had been easily thwarted. Gallipoli achieved nothing but to provide the Turks with the opportunity to slaughter British and French troops in copious numbers in a situation in which everything was in the defenders’ favour. Meanwhile, back on the Western Front, was the real enemy: the German Empire. Men, guns and munitions were in the process of being deployed to Gallipoli during the first British offensive at Neuve Chapelle; they were still there when the Germans launched their deadly gas attack at Ypres in April, during the debacles of Aubers Ridge and Festubert, and during the first ‘great push’ at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. At sea Jellicoe was facing the High Seas Fleet which could pick its moment to contest the ultimate control of the seas. This was the real war – Gallipoli was nothing but a foolish sideshow. ~ Peter Hart, #NFDB
411:How about we up the stakes? I win, you talk to me.”
Now it was my turn to raise my eyebrows. “I’m afraid to ask what you mean by talk…”
“Exactly that. I win, I get thirty minutes of your time tonight.”
“To charm me and lie to me and pretend to be whoever you think I want?”
“Nope. Tonight it’s me, in case you haven’t noticed. The real Rafe Martinez. A special one-night appearance.”
“And if I win?”
He grinned. “Then you get to spend thirty minutes with me, lucky birthday girl.”
I laughed and motioned for Daniel to start the countdown.
Rafe still pulled the “I don’t know what I’m doing” routine, starting slow and cautious, hoping I’d second-guess my assessment and take it easy. I didn’t. He realized that when my foot reached his shoulder level. By the midpoint, he’d shot up to my waist, but his muttered curses told me he’d underestimated how good I was--or overestimated how good he was--and it was clear he wasn’t going to catch up in time. So I stopped.
Daniel leaned over and mouthed, “What are you doing?” Below, the others yelled, a cacophony of shouts and cheers and jeers. Rafe reached up, his bracelet hitting the rock with a ping. I glanced at it. A worn rawhide band with a cat’s-eye stone. I could see his tattoo better, too, as he pulled himself up, and I recognized the symbol. A crow mother kachina. Hopi.
As he drew up alongside me, he cocked one brow.
“You really want that kiss don’t you?” he said.
“No, I just want to see what you can really do. ~ Kelley Armstrong,#NFDB
412:Genar-Hofoen found himself wondering again about the trade-off between skill-honing and distraction that took place in the development of any species likely to end up as one of those in play in the great galactic civilisation game. The Culture’s standard assessment held that the Affront spent far too much time hunting and not nearly enough time getting on with the business of being a responsible space-faring species (though of course the Culture was sophisticated enough to know that this was just its, admittedly subjective, way of looking at things; and besides, the more time the Affront spent dallying in their hunting parks and regaling each other with hunting tales in their carousing halls, the less they had for rampaging across their bit of the galaxy being horrible to people). But if the Affront didn’t love hunting as much as they did, would they still be the Affront? Hunting, especially the highly cooperative form of hunting in three dimensions which the Affront had evolved, required and encouraged intelligence, and it was generally - though not exclusively - intelligence that took a species into space. The required mix of common sense, inventiveness, compassion and aggression required was different for each; perhaps if you tried to make the Affront just a little less enraptured by hunting you would only be able to do so by making them much less intelligent and inquisitive. It was like play; it was fun at the time, when you were a child, but it was also training for when you became an adult. Fun was serious. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
413:A computational procedure is said to have a top-down organization if it has been constructed according to some well-defined and clearly understood fixed computational procedure (which may include some preassigned store of knowledge), where this procedure specifically provides a clear-cut solution to some problem at hand. (Euclid's algorithm for finding the highest common factor of two natural numbers, as described in ENM, p. 31, is a simple example of a top-down algorithm.) This is to be contrasted with a bottom-up organization, where such clearly defined rules of operation and knowledge store are not specified in advance, but instead there is a procedure laid down for the way that the system is to 'learn' and to improve its performance according to its 'experience'. Thus, with a bottom-up system, these rules of operation are subject to continual modification. One must allow that the system is to be run many times, performing its actions upon a continuing input of data. On each run, an assessment is made-perhaps by the system itself-and it modifies its operations, in the lifht of this assessment, with a view to improving this quality of output. For example, the input data for the system might be a number of photographs of human faces, appropriately digitized, and the system's task is to decide which photographs represent the same individuals and which do not. After each run, the system's performance is compared with the correct answers. Its rules of operation are then modified in such a way as to lead to a probable improvement in its performance on the next run. ~ Roger Penrose, #NFDB
414:God famously doesn't afflict Job because of anything Job has done, but because he wants to prove a point to Satan. Twenty years later, I am sympathetic with my first assessment; to me, in spite of the soft radiant beauty of many of its passages, the Bible still has a mechanical quality, a refusal to brook complexity that feels brutal and violent. There has been a change, however. When I look at Revelation now, it still seems frightening and impenetrable, and it still suggests an inexorable, ridiculous order that is unknowable by us, in which our earthly concerns matter very little. However, it not longer reads to me like a chronicle of arbitrarily inflicted cruelty. It reads like a terrible abstract of how we violate ourselves and others and thus bring down endless suffering on earth. When I read And they blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pain and their sores, and did not repent of their deeds, I think of myself and others I've known or know who blaspheme life itself by failing to have the courage to be honest and kind—and how then we rage around and lash out because we hurt. When I read the word fornication, I don't read it as a description of sex outside legal marriage: I read it as sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one's self or one's partner, let alone any sense of honor or even real playfulness. I still don't know what to make of much of it, but I'm inclined to read it as a writer's primitive attempt to give form to his moral urgency, to create a structure that could contain and give ballast to the most desperate human confusion. ~ Mary Gaitskill, #NFDB
415:When a high IQ-test score is accompanied by subpar performance in some other domain, this is thought "surprising," and a new disability category is coined to name the surprise. So, similarly, the diagnostic criterion for mathematics disorder (sometimes termed dyscalculia) in DSM IV is that "Mathematical ability that falls substantially below that expected for the individual's chronological age, measured intelligence, and age-appropriate education" (p. 50)-
The logic of discrepancy-based classification based on IQ-test performance
has created a clear precedent whereby we are almost obligated to create a new disability category when an important skill domain is found to be somewhat dissociated from intelligence. It is just this logic that I exploited in creating a new category of disability- dysrationalia.T he proposed definition of the disability was as follows:
Dysrationalia is the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence. It is a general term that refers to a heterogeneous group of disorders manifested by significant difficulties in belief formation, in the assessment of belief consistency, and/or in the determination of action to achieve one's goals. Although dysrationalia may occur concomitantly with other handicapping conditions (e.g., sensory impairment), dysrationalia is not the result of those conditions. The key diagnostic criterion for dysrationalia is a level of rationality, as demonstrated in thinking and behavior, that is significantly below the level of the individual's intellectual capacity (as determined by an individually administered IQ test). ~ Keith E Stanovich,#NFDB
416:Highwaymen?" she asked, and couldn't hide the hopeful note from her tone.
"In the middle of the day?"
"So they're desperate."
Being robbed wouldn't be pleasant, but it would actually be preferable compared to an angry criminal running them down from his stolen property.
"That would be the logical assumption, Becca,if we didn't just leave the house of a confirmed mass murderer."
"So you did find the evidence you were after?"
"It's in the book I asked you to smuggle out. Considering how quickly we left,my guess would be that Mary Pearson immediately mentioned to her husband that she'd put you in their bedroom, and that I entered it as well. Samuel would have gone straight upstairs in that case to check on the imcriminating ledger he'd carelessly left lying on the desk."
"And found it gone," she said with a resigned sigh.
"Don't sound so aggrieved. We'll be fine."
She could have screamed at him like a harpy for that ridiculous assessment. With two more shots fired at them, her fear was rising fast. It had been the same back at the Pearson house. The moment Rupert had warned that he'd disabled one of the servants,meaning they could be found out at any moment, her nausea had abruptly ended. Incredible. Did the sudden rush of fear do that? Not that she was going to seek out things to frighten her just to get through this pregnancy a little easier, but it as an interesting side effect. She could at least test the theory at home by having Flora try to startle her or...what the deuce was she doing thinking about things that might never happen when she could end up dead in minutes? ~ Johanna Lindsey,#NFDB
417:SELF-ASSESSMENTAre You an Empath? To find out, take the following empath self-assessment, answering “mostly yes” or “mostly no” to each question. •Have I ever been labeled overly sensitive, shy, or introverted? •Do I frequently get overwhelmed or anxious? •Do arguments and yelling make me ill? •Do I often feel like I don’t fit in? •Do crowds drain me, and do I need alone time to revive myself? •Do noise, odors, or nonstop talkers overwhelm me? •Do I have chemical sensitivities or a low tolerance for scratchy clothes? •Do I prefer taking my own car to places so that I can leave early if I need to? •Do I overeat to cope with stress? •Am I afraid of becoming suffocated by intimate relationships? •Do I startle easily? •Do I react strongly to caffeine or medications? •Do I have a low threshold for pain? •Do I tend to socially isolate? •Do I absorb other people’s stress, emotions, or symptoms? •Am I overwhelmed by multitasking, and do I prefer to do one thing at a time? •Do I replenish myself in nature? •Do I need a long time to recuperate after being with difficult people or energy vampires? •Do I feel better in small towns or the country rather than large cities? •Do I prefer one-to-one interactions and small groups to large gatherings? Now calculate your results. •If you answered yes to one to five questions, you’re at least a partial empath. •If you answered yes to six to ten questions, you have moderate empath tendencies. •If you answered yes to eleven to fifteen questions, you have strong empath tendencies. •If you answered yes to more than fifteen questions, you are a full-blown empath. ~ Judith Orloff, #NFDB
418:Within what we might call “classical cognitive science” (Piattelli-Palmarini, 2001) it has always been understood that the mind/brain is to be considered a computational-representational system. Yet, not all cognitive scientists have ever (fully) agreed with this assessment (e.g., Rumelhart et al., 1986). Actually, as of today, large parts of the field have concluded, primarily drawing on work in neuroscience, that neither symbolism nor computationalism are tenable and, as a consequence, have turned elsewhere. In contrast, classical cognitive scientists have always been critical of connectionist or network approaches to cognitive architecture (e.g., Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988), and recent work on memory (e.g., Gallistel and King, 2009; Gallistel and Matzel, 2013; Gallistel and Balsam, 2014) has been adding fuel to the fire. Recent work in neuroscience (Chen et al., 2014; Johansson et al., 2014; Ryan et al., 2015) has now provided first tentative neurobiological evidence for the cognitive scientists' doubts about the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain. If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? (Bizzi and Ajemian, 2015, p. 91) ~ Trettenbrein, P. C. (2016-01-01). "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift?",. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10 (88): 88. doi:10.3389/fnsys.2016.00088. PMC 5112247. PMID 27909400., #NFDB
419:Isn’t she wonderful?” Oliver’s voice held the same fatuous tone it had when he’d declared himself in love with Miss Smyth, the post’s newest laundress. Though he knew the answer to the question, Ethan couldn’t help teasing Oliver. “Isn’t who wonderful?” Oliver’s eyes widened, as if the answer should be apparent. “Miss Harding. Abigail. She’s the most wonderful woman I’ve ever met.” Ethan wouldn’t disagree with that assessment, even though he could not imagine Abigail as Mrs. Oliver Seton. “You think she’s wonderful even though she refused you?” “She’ll change her mind. I know she will. I tell you, Ethan, she’s the woman for me, even if she’s not as beautiful as her sister.” Ethan blinked in surprise. “You think Charlotte’s prettier than Abigail?” Oliver nodded. “Any man with eyes can see that, but Jeffrey spotted her first. Lucky man. Abigail’s next best.” The thought of Abigail as second best made Ethan clench his fists. Charlotte had a head filled with air. She would never have tried to help him out of the doldrums as Abigail had done, for she would not have even known he had sunk into the mire. Second best? Hah! “You’re crazy, Oliver. Anyone can see that Abigail’s twice the woman Charlotte is. I’m not denying that Charlotte is pretty, but Abigail is in a class of her own.” Oliver’s eyes narrowed as he regarded Ethan. “It sounds like you’re interested in her yourself.” Ridiculous. The thought was absurd. “Of course I’m not. I’m only pointing out the facts.” “I’m warning you, Ethan. You may outrank me, but you’d better not be setting your sights on Miss Harding, because I aim to marry her.” Without waiting for a reply, Oliver stalked away. ~ Amanda Cabot, #NFDB
420:I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts, since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher's positions. I agree that assessing validity and contextualizing historically are two entirely distinct matters and not to be confused with one another. And yet that firm distinction doesn't lead me to endorse the usual way in which history of philosophy is presented. ... The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse. The subject is far more interesting than that.
... When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed, then you've entered the context of justification. Considerations of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are relevant to the context of discovery, but not to justification. You have to keep them straight.... ...(T)he assessment of those intuitions in terms of the argument's soundness isn't accomplished by work done in the context of discovery. And conversely, one doesn't diminish a philosopher's achievement, and doesn't undermine its soundness, by showing how the particular set of questions on which he focused, the orientation he brought to bear on his focus, has some causal connection to the circumstances of his life (pp. 160-161). ~ Rebecca Goldstein,#NFDB
421:When I returned from the concert I wrote, in my very best hand, a letter to Flauvic requesting the favor of his advice on a matter of fashion. I sent it that night, and to my surprise, an answer awaited me when I woke in the morning. In fact, two answers awaited: one, the plain paper I had grown used to seeing from my Unknown, and the second, a beautifully folded and sealed sheet of imported linen paper.
This second one I opened first, to find only a line, but Flauvic’s handwriting was exquisite: He was entirely at my disposal, and I was welcome to consult him at any time.
The prospect was daunting and fascinating at the same time. Resolving to get that done directly after breakfast, I turned eagerly to the letter from the Unknown:
I can agree with your assessment of the ideal courtship, but I believe you err when you assume that everyone at Court has known the difference from age ten--or indeed, any age. There are those who will never perceive the difference, and then there are some who are aware to some degree of the difference but choose not to heed it. I need hardly add that the motivation here is usually lust for money or power, more than for the individual’s personal charms.
But I digress: To return to your subject, do you truly believe, then, that those who court must find themselves of one mind in all things? Must they study deeply and approve each other’s views on important subjects before they can risk contemplating marriage?
Well, I had to sit down and answer that.
I scrawled out two pages of thoughts, each following rapidly on the heels of its predecessor, until I discovered that the morning was already advancing. ~ Sherwood Smith,#NFDB
422:The reformers believe that scores will go up if it is easy to fire teachers and if unions are weakened. But is this true? No. The only test scores that can be used comparatively are those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, because it is a no-stakes test. No one knows who will take it, no one knows what will be on the test, no student takes the full test, and the results are not reported for individuals or for schools. There is no way to prepare for NAEP, so there is no test prep. There are no rewards or punishments attached to it, so there is no reason to cheat, to teach to the test, or to game the system. So, let’s examine the issues at hand using NAEP scores as a measure. The states that consistently have the highest test scores are Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Consistently ranking at the bottom are states in the South and the District of Columbia. The highest-ranking states have strong teachers’ unions and until recently had strong tenure protections for teachers. The lowest-ranking states do not have strong teachers’ unions, and their teachers have few or no job protections. There seems to be no correlation between having a strong union and having low test scores; if anything, it appears that the states with the strongest unions have the highest test scores. The lowest-performing states have one thing in common, and that is high poverty. The District of Columbia has a strong union and high poverty; it also has intense racial isolation in its schools. It has very low test scores. Most of the cities that rank at the very bottom on NAEP have teachers’ unions, and they have two things in common: high poverty and racial isolation. ~ Diane Ravitch, #NFDB
423:The purpose of this review is to evaluate the effects of chronic stress on hippocampal-dependent function, based primarily upon studies using young, adult male rodents and spatial navigation tasks. Despite this restriction, variability amongst the findings was evident and how or even whether chronic stress influenced spatial ability depended upon the type of task, the dependent variable measured and how the task was implemented, the type and duration of the stressors, housing conditions of the animals that include accessibility to food and cage mates, and duration from the end of the stress to the start of behavioral assessment. Nonetheless, patterns emerged as follows: For spatial memory, chronic stress impairs spatial reference memory and has transient effects on spatial working memory. For spatial learning, however, chronic stress effects appear to be task-specific: chronic stress impairs spatial learning on appetitively motivated tasks, such as the radial arm maze or holeboard, tasks that evoke relatively mild to low arousal components from fear. But under testing conditions that evoke moderate to strong arousal components from fear, such as during radial arm water maze testing, chronic stress appears to have minimal impairing effects or may even facilitate spatial learning. Chronic stress clearly impacts nearly every brain region and thus, how chronic stress alters hippocampal spatial ability likely depends upon the engagement of other brain structures during behavioral training and testing. ~ Conrad C.D. (2010). "A critical review of chronic stress effects on spatial learning and memory". Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry. 34 (5): 742–755. doi:10.1016/j.pnpbp.2009.11.003. PMID 19903505., #NFDB
424:Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, might be a bit less certain in his gloomy assessment of human nature: “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”10 Maybe, but cooperation runs deep in our species too. Recent findings in comparative primate intelligence have led researchers Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare to wonder whether an impulse toward cooperation might actually be the key to our species-defining intelligence. They write, “Instead of getting a jump start with the most intelligent hominids surviving to produce the next generation, as is often suggested, it may have been the more sociable hominids—because they were better at solving problems together—who achieved a higher level of fitness and allowed selection to favor more sophisticated problem-solving over time.”11 Humans got smart, they hypothesize, because our ancestors learned to cooperate. Innately selfish or not, the effects of food provisioning and habitat depletion on both wild chimpanzees and human foragers suggest that Dawkins and others who argue that humans are innately aggressive, selfish beasts should be careful about citing these chimp data in support of their case. Human groups tend to respond to food surplus and storage with behavior like that observed in chimps: heightened hierarchical social organization, intergroup violence, territorial perimeter defense, and Machiavellian alliances. In other words, humans—like chimps—tend to fight when there’s something worth fighting over. But for most of prehistory, there was no food surplus to win or lose and no home base to defend. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
425:New bureaucracy takes the form not of a specific, delimited function performed by particular workers but invades all areas of work, with the result that – as Kafka prophesied – workers become their own auditors, forced to assess their own performance. Take, for example, the ‘new system’ that OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) uses to inspect Further Education colleges. Under the old system, a college would have a ‘heavy’ inspection once every four years or so, i.e. one involving many lesson observations and a large number of inspectors present in the college. Under the new, ‘improved’ system, if a college can demonstrate that its internal assessment systems are effective, it will only have to undergo a ‘light’ inspection. But the downside of this ‘light’ inspection is obvious – surveillance and monitoring are outsourced from OFSTED to the college and ultimately to lecturers themselves, and become a permanent feature of the college structure (and of the psychology of individual lecturers). The difference between the old/heavy and new/light inspection system corresponds precisely to Kafka’s distinction between ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement, outlined above. With ostensible acquittal, you petition the lower court judges until they grant you a non-binding reprieve. You are then free from the court, until the time when your case is re-opened. Indefinite postponement, meanwhile, keeps your case at the lowest level of the court, but at the cost of an anxiety that has never ends. (The changes in OFSTED inspections are mirrored by in the change from the Research Assessment Exercise to the Research Excellence Framework in higher education: periodic assessment will be superseded by a permanent and ubiquitous measurement which cannot help but generate the same perpetual anxiety.) ~ Mark Fisher, #NFDB
426:Disappointment will come when your effort does not give you the expected return. If things don’t go as planned or if you face failure. Failure is extremely difficult to handle, but those that do come out stronger. What did this failure teach me? is the question you will need to ask. You will feel miserable. You will want to quit, like I wanted to when nine publishers rejected my first book. Some IITians kill themselves over low grades – how silly is that? But that is how much failure can hurt you. But it’s life. If challenges could always be overcome, they would cease to be a challenge. And remember – if you are failing at something, that means you are at your limit or potential. And that’s where you want to be.
Disappointment’ s cousin is Frustration, the second storm. Have you ever been frustrated? It happens when things are stuck. This is especially relevant in India. From traffic jams to getting that job you deserve, sometimes things take so long that you don’t know if you chose the right goal. After books, I set the goal of writing for Bollywood, as I thought they needed writers. I am called extremely lucky, but it took me five years to get close to a release. Frustration saps excitement, and turns your initial energy into something negative, making you a bitter person. How did I deal with it? A realistic assessment of the time involved – movies take a long time to make even though they are watched quickly, seeking a certain enjoyment in the process rather than the end result – at least I was learning how to write scripts, having a side plan – I had my third book to write and even something as simple as pleasurable distractions in your life – friends, food, travel can help you overcome it. Remember, nothing is to be taken seriously. Frustration is a sign somewhere, you took it too seriously. ~ Chetan Bhagat,#NFDB
427:The break with Maoist orthodoxy, at the same time, revealed the reformer’s dilemma. The revolutionary’s dilemma is that most revolutions occur in opposition to what is perceived as abuse of power. But the more existing obligations are dismantled, the more force must be used to re-create a sense of obligation. Hence the frequent outcome of revolution is an increase in central power; the more sweeping the revolution, the more this is true. The dilemma of reform is the opposite. The more the scope of choice is expanded, the harder it becomes to compartmentalize it. In pursuit of productivity, Deng stressed the importance of “thinking things out for yourself” and advocated the “complete” emancipation of minds. Yet what if those minds, once emancipated, demanded political pluralism? Deng’s vision called for “large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas,” but it assumed that these pathbreakers would limit themselves to exploring practical ways to build a prosperous China and stay away from exploration of ultimate political objectives. How did Deng envision reconciling emancipation of thought with the imperative for political stability? Was this a calculated risk, based on the assessment that China had no better alternative? Or did he, following Chinese tradition, reject the likelihood of any challenge to political stability, especially as Deng was making the Chinese people better off and considerably freer? Deng’s vision of economic liberalization and national revitalization did not include a significant move toward what would be recognized in the West as pluralistic democracy. Deng sought to preserve one-party rule not so much because he reveled in the perquisites of power (he famously abjured many of the luxuries of Mao and Jiang Qing), but because he believed the alternative was anarchy. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
428:Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are twenty-two fines that can be imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compensation Assessment (VCCA), the Law Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment Fund (LEOT), and Extradition Costs (EXTRA). The state takes a percentage each month out of a prisoner’s wages to pay for penalties. It can take decades to pay fines. Some 10 million Americans owe $50 billion in fees and fines because of their arrest or imprisonment, according to a 2015 report by the Brennan Center. If a prisoner who is fined $10,000 at sentencing relies solely on a prison salary, he or she will owe about $4,000 after making monthly payments for twenty-five years. Prisoners often leave prison in debt to the state. And if they cannot continue to make regular payments—difficult because of high unemployment among ex-felons—they are sent back to prison. High recidivism is part of the design. Most of the prison functions once handled by governments have become privatized. Corporations run prison commissaries and, since the prisoners have nowhere else to shop, often jack up prices by as much as 100 percent. Corporations have taken over the phone systems and grossly overcharge prisoners and their families. They demand exorbitant fees for money transfers from families to prisoners. And corporations, with workshops inside prisons, pay little more than a dollar a day to prison laborers. Food and merchandise vendors, construction companies, laundry services, uniform companies, prison equipment vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor, and the array of medieval-looking instruments used for the physical control of prisoners, and a host of other contractors feed like jackals off prisons. Prisons, in America, are big business. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
429:In any case, it is not as if the ‘light’ inspection is in any sense preferable for staff than the heavy one. The inspectors are in the college for the same amount of time as they were under the old system. The fact that there are fewer of them does nothing to alleviate the stress of the inspection, which has far more to do with the extra bureaucratic window-dressing one has to do in anticipation of a possible observation than it has to do with any actual observation itself. The inspection, that is to say, corresponds precisely to Foucault’s account of the virtual nature of surveillance in Discipline And Punish. Foucault famously observes there that there is no need for the place of surveillance to actually be occupied. The effect of not knowing whether you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance apparatus. You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed. Yet, in the case of school and university inspections, what you will be graded on is not primarily your abilities as a teacher so much as your diligence as a bureaucrat. There are other bizarre effects. Since OFSTED is now observing the college’s self-assessment systems, there is an implicit incentive for the college to grade itself and its teaching lower than it actually deserves. The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration. At one point, when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light inspection system, he told us that the problem with our departmental log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But don’t worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and will never be acted upon; as if performing self-flagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in cynical bureaucratic compliance were any less demoralizing. ~ Mark Fisher, #NFDB
430:I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer. How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues? As I write, Congress is dissolving its own Office of Technology Assessment—the only organization specifically tasked to provide advice to the House and Senate on science and technology. Its competence and integrity over the years have been exemplary. Of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, rarely in the twentieth century have as many as one percent had any significant background in science. The last scientifically literate President may have been Thomas Jefferson.* So how do Americans decide these matters? How do they instruct their representatives? Who in fact makes these decisions, and on what basis? — ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
431:Sniff, swill, sip 329 words Leading whisky expert Charles MacLean on the underrated art of downing a good Scotch. USE ALL YOUR SENSES We all love a splash of golden liquor now and then, but the fine art of appreciating whisky requires a heightening of the senses. 'Nosing' whisky, a technique employed by blenders, is called sensory evaluation or analeptic assessment. Prior to sipping, examine its colour and 'tears', which are the reams left behind on the glass after you swirl it. Even our sense of hearing can help us judge the whisky; a full bottle should open with a happy little pluck of the cap. APPRECIATE A GOOD MALT Appreciation and enjoyment are two dimensions of downing a stiff one. Identify how you like your whisky (with ice, soda or water) and stick with it. Getting sloshed on blended whisky is all very good, but you will need single malt and an understanding of three simple things to truly cherish your drink. A squat glass with a bulb at the bottom releases the full burst of its aroma when swilled. A narrow rim is an added advantage. Instead of topping the drink with ice, which dilutes the aroma, go for water. NIBBLE, DON'T GOBBLE Small bites pair best with your whisky. It excites the palate minimally, letting you detect the characteristics of the whisky through contrast. If you're not a big fan of food and whisky pairing, skip it. OLD IS GOLD While old whiskies are not necessarily better, it's a known fact that most of the finer whiskies are well-aged. I would consider whiskies that are anywhere between 18 and 50 years as old, but it also depends on the age of the cask. If the cask is reactive, it will dominate the flavours of the whisky within ten years of the ageing process. If you leave the spirit in the cask for much longer, the flavour of the whisky will be overpowered by the wood, lending it a distinct edge. Maclean was in Delhi to conduct the Singleton Sensorial experience. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
432:Adrian looked over at me again. “Who knows more about male weakness: you or me?”
“Go on.” I refused to directly answer the question.
“Get a new dress. One that shows a lot of skin. Short. Strapless. Maybe a push-up bra too.” He actually had the audacity to do a quick assessment of my chest. “Eh, maybe not. But definitely some high heels.”
“Adrian,” I exclaimed. “You’ve seen how Alchemists dress. Do you think I can really wear something like that?”
He was unconcerned. “You’ll make it work. You’ll change clothes or something. But I’m telling you, if you want to get a guy to do something that might be difficult, then the best way is to distract him so that he can’t devote his full brainpower to the consequences.”
“You don’t have a lot of faith in your own gender.”
“Hey, I’m telling you the truth. I’ve been distracted by sexy dresses a lot.”
I didn’t really know if that was a valid argument, seeing as Adrian was distracted by a lot of things. Fondue. T-shirts. Kittens. “And so, what then? I show some skin, and the world is mine?”
“That’ll help.” Amazingly, I could tell he was dead serious. “And you’ve gotta act confident the whole time, like it’s already a done deal. Then make sure when you’re actually asking for what you want that you tell him you’d be ‘so, so grateful.’ But don’t elaborate. His imagination will do half the work for you. ”
I shook my head, glad we’d almost reached our destination. I didn’t know how much more I could listen to. “This is the most ridiculous advice I’ve ever heard. It’s also kind of sexist too, but I can’t decide who it offends more, men or women.”
“Look, Sage. I don’t know much about chemistry or computer hacking or photosynthery, but this is something I’ve got a lot of experience with.” I think he meant photosynthesis, but I didn’t correct him. “Use my knowledge. Don’t let it go to waste. ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
433:Well, this all seems entirely outrageous,” Sadler put in, though his wan cheeks showed he had some notion of the ramifications. “My girl would never run off with that scoundrel. She knows better.”
“Does she?” Blakeborough said cynically, to Dom’s surprise. “Until she ended up with Rathmoor’s brother, you feared she might actually marry Samuel.”
“But that was long before he got cut off by your esteemed father,” Sadler said. “Once that happened, Nancy agreed with me when I stated that the fellow was a rascal and not to be trusted.” He winced. “If you’ll pardon me for saying so, Lord Blakeborough.”
Blackborough’s hard laugh cut through the room. “No need to beg pardon from me, sir. I know what my brother is capable of.”
Jane twisted to look up at him. “And what is that, Edwin? I mean, he…he wouldn’t hurt Nancy, would he?”
The earl glanced at Dom, as if appealing to him for help in dealing with Jane’s delicate feelings.
“She already knows what got Barlow disinherited, I’m afraid,” Dom said. “I consulted with Lord Ravenswood on the matter, and she overheard our discussion.”
“Dear God,” Blakeborough muttered.
“What?” Sadler asked. “What is it?”
“Well, Edwin?” Jane asked anxiously. “Would he hurt her?”
Blakeborough squeezed Jane’s shoulder, then left his hand resting there. That seemed remarkably intimate for a man who supposedly had only a platonic-sounding “arrangement” with her.
Dom tamped down his urge to go knock the earl’s hand from here into the next county.
“It depends on how you define ‘hurt,’” Blakeborough mused aloud. “I don’t think he’d…do what he did before with that other poor girl.”
“What other poor girl?” Sadler cried.
“It’s all right, Mr. Sadler,” Dom cut in. “Tristan and I agree with the earl’s assessment. We think Barlow is enamored of your daughter and wouldn’t harm her.”
He probably shouldn’t mention his suspicions about what Nancy was capable of. Her father might not handle that well at all. ~ Sabrina Jeffries,#NFDB
434:Do not say, 'But it is hypocritical to thank God with my tongue when I don't feel thankful in my heart.' There is such a thing as hypocritical thanksgiving. Its aim is to conceal ingratitude and get the praise of men. That is not your aim. Your aim in loosing your tongue with words of gratitude is that God would be merciful and fill your words with the emotion of true gratitude. You are not seeking the praise of men; you are seeing the mercy of God. You are not hiding the hardness of ingratitude, but hoping for the in-breaking of the Spirit.
Thanksgiving with the Mouth Stirs Up Thankfulness in the Heart
Moreover, we should probably ask the despairing saint, 'Do you know your heart so well that you are sure the words of thanks have no trace of gratitude in them?' I, for one, distrust my own assessment of my motives. I doubt that I know my good ones well enough to see all the traces of contamination. And I doubt that I know my bad ones well enough to see the traces of grace. Therefore, it is not folly for a Christian to assume that there is a residue of gratitude in his heart when he speaks and sings of God's goodness even though he feels little or nothing. To this should be added that experience shows that doing the right thing, in the way I have described, is often the way toward being in the right frame. Hence Baxter gives this wise counsel to the oppressed Christian:
'Resolve to spend most of your time in thanksgiving and praising God. If you cannot do it with the joy that you should, yet do it as you can. You have not the power of your comforts; but have you no power of your tongues? Say not that you are unfit for thanks and praises unless you have a praising heart and were the children of God; for every man, good and bad, is bound to praise God, and to be thankful for all that he hath received, and to do it as well as he can, rather than leave it undone.... Doing it as you can is the way to be able to do it better. Thanksgiving stirreth up thankfulness in the heart. ~ John Piper,#NFDB
435:The slave protests against the condition of his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel protests against the human condition in general. The rebel slave affirms that there is something in him which will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe. For both of them it is not only a problem of pure and simple negation. In fact in both cases we find an assessment of values in the name of which the rebel refuses to accept the condition in which he finds himself. The slave who opposes his master is not concerned, let us note, with repudiating his master as a human being. He is repudiating him as master. He denies his right to deny him, as a slave, by making excessive demands. The master fails to the extent that he does not respond to a demand that he ignores. If men cannot refer to common values, which they all separately recognize, then man is incomprehensible to man. The rebel demands that these values should be clearly recognized as part of himself because he knows or suspects that, without them, crime and disorder would reign in the world. An act of rebellion seems to him like a demand for clarity and unity. The most elementary rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration to order. This description can be applied, word for word, to the metaphysical rebel. He attacks a shattered world to make it whole. He confronts the injustice at large in the world with his own principles of justice. Thus all he originally wants is to resolve this contradiction and establish a reign of justice, if he can, or of injustice if he is driven to the end of his tether. Meanwhile he denounces the contradiction. Metaphysical rebellion is the justified claim of a desire for unity against the suffering of life and death – in that it protests against the incompleteness of human life, expressed by death, and its dispersion, expressed by evil. If a mass death sentence defines man’s condition, then rebellion, in one sense, is its contemporary. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
436:4. In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue. Humility is having an accurate assessment of your own nature and your own place in the cosmos. Humility is awareness that you are an underdog in the struggle against your own weakness. Humility is an awareness that your individual talents alone are inadequate to the tasks that have been assigned to you. Humility reminds you that you are not the center of the universe, but you serve a larger order. 5. Pride is the central vice. Pride is a problem in the sensory apparatus. Pride blinds us to the reality of our divided nature. Pride blinds us to our own weaknesses and misleads us into thinking we are better than we are. Pride makes us more certain and closed-minded than we should be. Pride makes it hard for us to be vulnerable before those whose love we need. Pride makes coldheartedness and cruelty possible. Because of pride we try to prove we are better than those around us. Pride deludes us into thinking that we are the authors of our own lives. 6. Once the necessities for survival are satisfied, the struggle against sin and for virtue is the central drama of life. No external conflict is as consequential or as dramatic as the inner campaign against our own deficiencies. This struggle against, say, selfishness or prejudice or insecurity gives meaning and shape to life. It is more important than the external journey up the ladder of success. This struggle against sin is the great challenge, so that life is not futile or absurd. It is possible to fight this battle well or badly, humorlessly or with cheerful spirit. Contending with weakness often means choosing what parts of yourself to develop and what parts not to develop. The purpose of the struggle against sin and weakness is not to “win,” because that is not possible; it is to get better at waging it. It doesn’t matter if you work at a hedge fund or a charity serving the poor. There are heroes and schmucks in both worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in this struggle. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
437:What rules, then, can one follow if one is dedicated to the truth? First, never speak falsehood. Second, bear in mind that the act of withholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and that in each instance in which the truth is withheld a significant moral decision is required. Third, the decision to withhold the truth should never be based on personal needs, such as a need for power, a need to be liked or a need to protect one’s map from challenge. Fourth, and conversely, the decision to withhold the truth must always be based entirely upon the needs of the person or people from whom the truth is being withheld. Fifth, the assessment of another’s needs is an act of responsibility which is so complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other. Sixth, the primary factor in the assessment of another’s needs is the assessment of that person’s capacity to utilize the truth for his or her own spiritual growth. Finally, in assessing the capacity of another to utilize the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity. All this might seem like an extraordinary task, impossible to ever perfectly complete, a chronic and never-ending burden, a real drag. And it is indeed a never-ending burden of self-discipline, which is why most people opt for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closedness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. It is easier that way. Yet the rewards of the difficult life of honesty and dedication to the truth are more than commensurate with the demands. By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people. Through their openness they can establish and maintain intimate relationships far more effectively than more closed people. Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
438:Stanley Meets Mutesa
Such a time of it they had;
The heat of the day
The chill of the night
And the mosquitoes that followed.
Such was the time and
They bound for a kingdom.
The thin weary line of carries
With tattered dirty rags to cover their backs;
The battered bulky chests
That kept on falling off their shaven heads.
Their tempers high and hot
The sun fierce and scorching
With it rose their spirits
With its fall their hopes
As each day sweated their bodies dry and
Flies clung in clumps on their sweat scented backs.
Such was the march
And the hot season just breaking.
Each day a weary pony dropped
Left for the vultures on the plains;
Each afternoon a human skeleton collapsed,
But the march trudged on
Its Khaki leader in front
He the spirit that inspired
He the light of hope.
Then came the afternoon of a hungry march,
A hot and hungry march it was;
The Nile and the Nyanza
Lay like two twins
Azure across the green country side.
The march leapt on chaunting
Like young gazelles to a water hole.
Heart beat faster
Loads felt lighter
As the cool water lapt their sore feet.
No more the dread of hungry hyenas
But only tales of valour when
At Mutesa’s court fires are lit.
No more the burning heat of the day
But song, laughter and dance.
The village looks on behind banana groves,
Children peer behind reed fences.
Such was the welcome
No singing women to chaunt a welcome
Or drums to greet the white ambassador;
Only a few silent nods from aged faces
And one rumbling drum roll
To summon Mutesa’s court to parley
For the country was not sure.
The gate of needs is flung open,
There is silence
But only a moment’s silenceA silence of assessment.
The tall black king steps forward,
He towers over the thin bearded white man,
Then grabbing his lean white hand
Manages to whisper
“Mtu Mweupe Karibu”
white man you are welcome.
The gate of polished reed closes behind them
And the West is let in.
~ David Rubadiri,#NFDB
439:(...) You Sophotechs are smarter than I am; why did you let me do such a foolish thing?”
“We answer every question our resources and instruction parameters allow; we are more than happy to advise you, when and if we are asked.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking of, and you know it.”
“You are thinking we should use force to defend you against yourself against your will? That is hardly a thought worth thinking, sir. Your life has exactly the value you yourself place on it. It is yours to damage or ruin as you wish.”
(...)
“Is that another hint? Are you saying I’m destroying my life? People at the party, twice now, have said or implied that I’m going to endanger the Oecumene itself. Who stopped me?”
“Not I. While life continues, it cannot be made to be without risk. The assessment of whether or not a certain risk is worth taking depends on subjective value-judgments. About such judgments even reasonable men can differ. We Sophotechs will not interfere with such decisions. (...) If we were to overrule your ownership of your own life, your life, would, in effect, become our property, and you, in effect, would become merely the custodian or trustee of that life. Do you think you would value it more in such a case, or less? And if you valued it less, would you not take greater risks and behave more self-destructively? If, on the other hand, each man’s life is his own, he may experiment freely, risking only what is his, till he find his best happiness.”
“I see the results of failed experiments all around us, in these cylinders. I see wasted lives, and people trapped in mind sets and life forms which lead nowhere.”
“While life continues, experimentation and evolution must also. The pain and risk of failure cannot be eliminated. The most we can do is maximize human freedom, so that no man is forced to pay for another man’s mistakes, so that the pain of failure falls only on he who risks it. And you do not know which ways of life lead nowhere. Even we Sophotechs do not know where all paths lead.”
“How benevolent of you! We will always be free to be stupid.”
“Cherish that freedom, young master; it is basic to all others. ~ John C Wright,#NFDB
440:The Huge Artifice:
an interim assessment
Enough of this great work has now appeared
For sightings to be taken, the ground cleared,
Though the main purpose - what it's all about
In the thematic sense - remains in doubt.
We can be certain, even at this stage,
That seriousness adequate to engage
Our deepest critical concern is not
To be found here. First: what there is of plot
Is thin, repetitive, leaning far too much
On casual meetings, parties, fights and such,
With that excessive use of coincidence
Which betrays authorial inexperience.
We note, besides these evident signs of haste,
A great deal in most questionable taste:
Too many sex-scenes, far too many coarse
Jokes, most of which have long lost all their force.
It might be felt that, after a slow start,
Abundance incident made amends for art,
But the work's 'greatness' is no more than size,
While the shaping mind, and all that implies,
Is on a trivial scale, as can be guessed
From the brash nature of the views expressed
By a figure in an early episode, who
Was clearly introduced in order to
Act as some kind of author-surrogate,
Then hastily killed off - an unfortunate
Bid to retrieve a grave strategic lapse.
More damaging than any of this, the gaps
In sensitivity displayed are vast.
Concepts that have not often been surpassed
For ignorance or downright nastiness -
That the habit of indifference is less
Destructive than the embrace of love, that crimes
Are paid for never or a thousand times,
That the gentle come to grief - all these are forced
Into scenes, dialogue, comment, and endorsed
By the main action, manifesting there
An inhumanity beyond despair.
One final point remains: it has been urged
That a few characters are not quite submerged
In all this rubbish, the they can display
Reason, justice and forethought on their day,
And that this partly exculpates the mind
That was their author. Not at all. We find
Many of these in the history of art
(So this reviewer feels), who stand apart,
Who by no purpose but their own begin
To struggle free from a base origin. ~ Kingsley Amis,#NFDB
441:One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it's accompanied by an error bar - a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It's a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge. Except in pure mathematics nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false). Moreover, scientists are usually careful to characterize the veridical status of.their attempts to understand the world - ranging from conjectures and hypotheses, which are highly tentative, all the way up to laws of Nature which are repeatedly and systematically confirmed through many interrogations of how the world works. But even laws of Nature are not absolutely certain. There may be new circumstances never before examined - inside black holes, say, or within the electron, or close to the speed of light -where even our vaunted laws of Nature break down and, however valid they may be in ordinary circumstances, need correction. Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
442:Cade quickly checked his cell phone.
Of course Vaughn, with his FBI superpowers of perception, had to comment.
“Got another offer on the table that expires soon?” he asked.
“Go away.”
Vaughn grinned. “You’re quite circumspect about this situation with Brooke. I find that very intriguing, don’t you, Hux?”
No reply.
“Hux?” Vaughn looked to his right, where Huxley was reading something on his phone. With an unmistakable smile, he tucked his phone into the pocket of his impeccably tailored Ralph Lauren suit, and then noticed Cade and Vaughn looking at him. “Sorry. What were we talking about?”
“Just giving Cade crap about a certain sexy general counsel. But never mind that.” Vaughn pointed suspiciously. “What’s going on here, with the phone and the sneaky smile?” He studied his partner. “Don’t tell me you actually have a hot date tonight.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you.” Huxley took a sip of his beer, deliberately leaving them hanging.
“Look at you,” Cade said. “With who?”
“Addison.”
“Addison? Who’s—” It took Vaughn a second, then his mouth fell open. “Agent Simms? When did this happen?”
Huxley swirled his glass, looking quite coy. “Things have been percolating for a while. But they shifted into high gear after our fake date at Sogna.”
Vaughn threw out his hands in exasperation. “First Morgan, now you. Plus McCall’s getting married next month, and Pallas is having a kid. Purposely. Am I the only one not getting laid as part of an FBI sting operation?”
Huxley pretended to muse over this. “Maybe you should take some time. Figure out what’s gone wrong with your mojo these days.”
“My mojo is perfectly fine,” Vaughn assured him.
Cade was curious. “Is it serious?”
Huxley smiled. “Yeah. I think so.”
Vaughn scoffed at this. “Come on. You’ve only been seeing her for, what, a month?”
Huxley shrugged. “I like her. She likes me. It’s not that complicated.”
Cade and Vaughn threw each other looks. Right.
“Amateur,” Vaughn said, with a conspiratorial grin.
“Amateur, huh? I’ll be sure to ask Addison tonight if she agrees with that assessment.”
And if his confident smile was any indication, Agent Seth Huxley wasn’t worried about the answer to that one bit. ~ Julie James,#NFDB
443:In a section titled “Performance Factors,” Clint had been asked to indicate areas in which I’d exhibited significant strengths, as well as any areas needing development. There were only two areas in which he felt I needed development—organization (probably because he’d ridden in my car) and working more closely with third parties—but he had indicated six major strengths. The first three were creativity, achievement of objectives, and quality of work. No surprises there. The next three strengths—adaptability, communication, and autonomy—seemed a bit ironic. I scrolled down and saw my overall score: Very Good. By definition, this score meant that I had “exceeded objectives in several areas and required only occasional supervision.” I didn’t appreciate the real irony of Clint’s assessment until I looked at my stakeholder map and considered how I might have scored had Kristen conducted a similar evaluation at home. What score would I have received for adaptability? The review form defined this as “being open to change with new circumstances.” Going with the flow. We had just begun to work on my openness to change at home, and I was still learning how to adjust to this new mind-set. Meanwhile, at work, I presented myself as nothing if not adaptable. “Sure, I’ll take a new position on the marketing team.” “Of course I can stay until midnight tonight. Whatever it takes.” “Certainly, Clint, I’ll travel to customers every week. Anything else?” At home, Kristen asked me to help fold laundry and my head almost exploded. I guessed that I would receive Needs Development for that one. How about autonomy and initiative? Clint seemed to think that I was bursting with it, but Kristen would have offered a different opinion. “Initiative? Please. How is me having to remind you to turn off the television and play with the kids initiative? I’ll put you down for a Needs Development,” I imagined her saying. Achievement of objectives would have gotten me a high mark with Kristen, until I scrolled down farther and read the definition, which included the phrase “gets things done efficiently and in a timely manner.” I thought of the Christmas decorations drooping from our eaves. I thought of the countless times Kristen and I had been late for an engagement and she’d found me standing in my boxers in front of the mirror making faces. ~ David Finch, #NFDB
444:We have no obligation to endure or enable certain types of certain toxic relationships. The Christian ethic muddies these waters because we attach the concept of long-suffering to these damaging connections. We prioritize proximity over health, neglecting good boundaries and adopting a Savior role for which we are ill-equipped.
Who else we'll deal with her?, we say. Meanwhile, neither of you moves towards spiritual growth. She continues toxic patterns and you spiral in frustration, resentment and fatigue.
Come near, dear one, and listen. You are not responsible for the spiritual health of everyone around you. Nor must you weather the recalcitrant behavior of others. It is neither kind nor gracious to enable. We do no favors for an unhealthy friend by silently enduring forever. Watching someone create chaos without accountability is not noble. You won't answer for the destructive habits of an unsafe person. You have a limited amount of time and energy and must steward it well. There is a time to stay the course and a time to walk away.
There's a tipping point when the effort becomes useless, exhausting beyond measure. You can't pour antidote into poison forever and expect it to transform into something safe, something healthy. In some cases, poison is poison and the only sane response is to quit drinking it.
This requires honest self evaluation, wise counselors, the close leadership of the Holy Spirit, and a sober assessment of reality. Ask, is the juice worth the squeeze here. And, sometimes, it is. You might discover signs of possibility through the efforts, or there may be necessary work left and it's too soon to assess. But when an endless amount of blood, sweat and tears leaves a relationship unhealthy, when there is virtually no redemption, when red flags are frantically waved for too long, sometimes the healthiest response is to walk away.
When we are locked in a toxic relationship, spiritual pollution can murder everything tender and Christ-like in us. And a watching world doesn't always witness those private kill shots. Unhealthy relationships can destroy our hope, optimism, gentleness. We can lose our heart and lose our way while pouring endless energy into an abyss that has no bottom. There is a time to put redemption in the hands of God and walk away before destroying your spirit with futile diligence. ~ Jen Hatmaker,#NFDB
445:While whites were still the majority, they established preferences for blacks and Hispanics that took such deep root that Congress and state legislatures have been powerless to abolish them. These programs would provoke outrage if they were practiced in favor of whites, but they have been partially curbed only by state ballot initiatives and equivocal Supreme Court decisions. Demography would change this. In 2006, the state of Michigan voted to abolish racial preferences in college admissions and state contracting, but the measure passed only because whites were still a majority. Eighty-five percent of blacks and 69 percent of Hispanics voted to maintain racial preferences for themselves. When they have a voting majority nothing will prevent non-whites from reestablishing and extending preferences.
Are there portents in the actions of Eric Holder, the first black attorney general, appointed by the first black president? J. Christian Adams, a white Justice Department lawyer resigned in protest when the department dropped a case of voter intimidation the previous administration had already won by default against the New Black Panther Party. In this 2008 case, fatigue-clad blacks waved billy clubs at white voters and yelled such things as “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” Mr. Adams called it “the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career.” He believed the decision to dismiss the case reflected hostility to the rights of whites. He said some of his colleagues called selective prosecution “payback time,” adding that “citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims.”
Christopher Coates, who was the head of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division, agreed with this assessment. In sworn testimony before Congress, he called the dismissal of the Black Panthers case a “travesty of justice” and described a “hostile atmosphere” against “race-neutral enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act. He said the department had a “deep-seated opposition to the equal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act against racial minorities and for the protection of white voters who have been discriminated against.”
How will the department behave when whites become a minority? ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
446:When he had ate his fill, and proceeded from the urgent first cup and necessary second to the voluntary third which might be toyed with at leisure, without any particular outcry seeming to suggest he should be on his guard, he leant back, spread the city’s news before him, and, by glances between the items, took a longer survey of the room. Session of the Common Council. Vinegars, Malts, and Spirituous Liquors, Available on Best Terms. Had he been on familiar ground, he would have been able to tell at a glance what particular group of citizens in the great empire of coffee this house aspired to serve: whether it was the place for poetry or gluttony, philosophy or marine insurance, the Indies trade or the meat-porters’ burial club. Ships Landing. Ships Departed. Long Island Estate of Mr De Kyper, with Standing Timber, to be Sold at Auction. But the prints on the yellowed walls were a mixture. Some maps, some satires, some ballads, some bawdy, alongside the inevitable picture of the King: pop-eyed George reigning over a lukewarm graphical gruel, neither one thing nor t’other. Albany Letter, Relating to the Behaviour of the Mohawks. Sermon, Upon the Dedication of the Monument to the Late Revd. Vesey. Leases to be Let: Bouwerij, Out Ward, Environs of Rutgers’ Farm. And the company? River Cargos Landed. Escaped Negro Wench: Reward Offered. – All he could glean was an impression generally businesslike, perhaps intersown with law. Dramatic Rendition of the Classics, to be Performed by the Celebrated Mrs Tomlinson. Poem, ‘Hail Liberty, Sweet Succor of a Briton’s Breast’, Offered by ‘Urbanus’ on the Occasion of His Majesty’s Birthday. Over there there were maps on the table, and a contract a-signing; and a ring of men in merchants’ buff-and-grey quizzing one in advocate’s black-and-bands. But some of the clients had the wind-scoured countenance of mariners, and some were boys joshing one another. Proceedings of the Court of Judicature of the Province of New-York. Poor Law Assessment. Carriage Rates. Principal Goods at Mart, Prices Current. Here he pulled out a printed paper of his own from an inner pocket, and made comparison of certain figures, running his left and right forefingers down the columns together. Telescopes and Spy-Glasses Ground. Regimental Orders. Dinner of the Hungarian Club. Perhaps there were simply too few temples here to coffee, for them to specialise as he was used. ~ Francis Spufford, #NFDB
447:The educational goal of self-esteem seems to habituate young people to work that lacks objective standards and revolves instead around group dynamics. When self-esteem is artificially generated, it becomes more easily manipulable, a product of social technique rather than a secure possession of one’s own based on accomplishments. Psychologists find a positive correlation between repeated praise and “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.” 36 The more children are praised, the more they have a stake in maintaining the resulting image they have of themselves; children who are praised for being smart choose the easier alternative when given a new task. 37 They become risk-averse and dependent on others. The credential loving of college students is a natural response to such an education, and prepares them well for the absence of objective standards in the job markets they will enter; the validity of your self-assessment is known to you by the fact it has been dispensed by gatekeeping institutions. Prestigious fellowships, internships, and degrees become the standard of self-esteem. This is hardly an education for independence, intellectual adventurousness, or strong character. “If you don’t vent the drain pipe like this, sewage gases will seep up through the water in the toilet, and the house will stink of shit.” In the trades, a master offers his apprentice good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, the better to realize ends the goodness of which is readily apparent. The master has no need for a psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better. He is able to explain what he does to the apprentice, because there are rational principles that govern it. Or he may explain little, and the learning proceeds by example and imitation. For the apprentice there is a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the master’s actions. He may not know why things have to be done a certain way at first, and have to take it on faith, but the rationale becomes apparent as he gains experience. Teamwork doesn’t have this progressive character. It depends on group dynamics, which are inherently unstable and subject to manipulation. On a crew, ~ Matthew B Crawford, #NFDB
448:Did he say anything to you?”
“Just that I was supposed to watch you while he was gone. A hunt can take several days.”
“Really? I had no idea it would take that long.” I hestitated, “So…he doesn’t mind you staying here while he’s gone.”
“Oh, he minds,” he chuckled, “but he wants to make sure you’re safe. At least he trusts me that much.”
“Well, I think he’s mad at both of us right now.”
Kishan looked at me curiously with a raised eyebrow. “How so?”
“Um…let’s just say we had a misunderstanding.”
Kishan’s face turned hard. “Don’t worry, Kelsey. I’m sure that whatever he’s upset about is foolish. He’s very argumentative.”
I sighed and shook my head sadly. “No, it’s really all my fault. I’m difficult, a hindrance, and I’m a pain to have around sometimes. He’s probably used to being around sophisticated, more experienced women who are much more…more…well, more than I am.”
Kishan quirked an eyebrow. “Ren hasn’t been around any women as far as I know. I must confess that I’m now exceedingly curious as to what your argument was about. Whether you tell me or not, I won’t tolerate any more derogatory comments about yourself. He’s lucky to have you, and he’d better realize it.”
He grinned. “Of course, if you did have a falling out, you’re always welcome to stay with me.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I don’t really want to live in the jungle.”
He laughed. “For you, I would even consider a change of residence. You, my lovely, are a prize worth fighting for.”
I laughed and punched him lightly on the arm. “You, sir, are a major flirt. Worth fighting for? I think you two have been tigers for too long. I’m no great beauty, especially when I’m stuck out here in the jungle. I haven’t even picked a college major yet. What have I ever done that would make someone want to fight over me?”
Kishan apparently took my rhetorical questions seriously. He reflected for a moment, and then answered, “For one thing, I’ve never met a woman so dedicated to helping others. You put your own life at risk for a person you met only a few weeks ago. You are confident, feisty, intelligent, and full of empathy. I find you charming and, yes, beautiful.”
The golden-eyed prince fingered a strand of my hair. I blushed at his assessment, sipped my water, and then said softly, “I don’t like him being angry with me.”
Kishan shrugged and dropped his hand, looking slightly annoyed that I’d steered the conversation back to Ren. “Yes. I’ve been on the receiving side of his anger, and I’ve learned not to underestimate his ability to hold a grudge. ~ Colleen Houck,#NFDB
449:Entering the office, Evie found Sebastian and Cam on opposite sides of the desk. They both mulled over account ledgers, scratching out some entries with freshly inked pens, and making notations beside the long columns. Both men looked up as she crossed the threshold. Evie met Sebastian’s gaze only briefly; she found it hard to maintain her composure around him after the intimacy of the previous night. He paused in mid-sentence as he stared at her, seeming to forget what he had been saying to Cam. It seemed that neither of them was yet comfortable with feelings that were still too new and powerful. Murmuring good morning to them both, she bid them to remain seated, and she went to stand beside Sebastian’s chair.
“Have you breakfasted yet, my lord?” she asked.
Sebastian shook his head, a smile glinting in his eyes. “Not yet.”
“I’ll go to the kitchen and see what is to be had.”
“Stay a moment,” he urged. “We’re almost finished.”
As the two men discussed a few last points of business, which pertained to a potential investment in a proposed shopping bazaar to be constructed on St. James Street, Sebastian picked up Evie’s hand, which was resting on the desk. Absently he drew the backs of her fingers against the edge of his jaw and his ear while contemplating the written proposal on the desk before him. Although Sebastian was not aware of what the casual familiarity of the gesture revealed, Evie felt her color rise as she met Cam’s gaze over her husband’s downbent head. The boy sent her a glance of mock reproof, like that of a nursemaid who had caught two children playing a kissing game, and he grinned as her blush heightened further.
Oblivious to the byplay, Sebastian handed the proposal to Cam, who sobered instantly. “I don’t like the looks of this,” Sebastian commented. “It’s doubtful there will be enough business in the area to sustain an entire bazaar, especially at those rents. I suspect within a year it will turn into a white elephant.”
“White elephant?” Evie asked.
A new voice came from the doorway, belonging to Lord Westcliff. “A white elephant is a rare animal,” the earl replied, smiling, “that is not only expensive but difficult to maintain. Historically, when an ancient king wished to ruin someone he would gift him with a white elephant.” Stepping into the office, Westcliff bowed over Evie’s hand and spoke to Sebastian. “Your assessment of the proposed bazaar is correct, in my opinion. I was approached with the same investment opportunity not long ago, and I rejected it on the same grounds.”
“No doubt we’ll both be proven wrong,” Sebastian said wryly. “One should never try to predict anything regarding women and their shopping. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
450:Even with the questions and worries that flooded her, Lillian was overcome with sudden exhaustion. The waking nightmare had come to a precipitate end, and it seemed that for now there was nothing more she could do. She waited docilely, her cheek resting against the steady support of Marcus’s shoulder, only half hearing the conversation that ensued.
“… have to find St. Vincent…” Marcus was saying.
“No,” Simon Hunt said emphatically, “I’ll find St. Vincent. You take care of Miss Bowman.”
“We need privacy.”
“I believe there is a small room nearby— more of a vestibule, actually…”
But Hunt’s voice trailed away, and Lillian became aware of a new, ferocious tension in Marcus’s body. With a lethal shift of his muscles, he turned to glance in the direction of the staircase.
St. Vincent was descending, having entered the rented room from the other side of the inn and found it empty. Stopping midway down the stairs, St. Vincent took in the curious tableau before him… the clusters of bewildered onlookers, the affronted innkeeper… and the Earl of Westcliff, who stared at him with avid bloodlust.
The entire inn fell silent during that chilling moment, so that Westcliff’s quiet snarl was clearly audible. “By God, I’m going to butcher you.”
Dazedly Lillian murmured, “Marcus, wait—”
She was shoved unceremoniously at Simon Hunt, who caught her reflexively as Marcus ran full-bore toward the stairs. Instead of skirting around the banister, Marcus vaulted the railings and landed on the steps like a cat. There was a blur of movement as St. Vincent attempted a strategic retreat, but Marcus flung himself upward, catching his legs and dragging him down. They grappled, cursed, and exchanged punishing blows, until St. Vincent aimed a kick at Marcus’s head. Rolling to avoid the blow of his heavy boot, Marcus was forced to release him temporarily. The viscount lurched up the stairs, and Marcus sprang after him. Soon they were both out of sight. A crowd of enthusiastic men followed, shouting advice, exchanging odds, and exclaiming in excitement over the spectacle of a pair of noblemen fighting like spurred roosters.
White-faced, Lillian glanced at Simon Hunt, who wore a faint smile. “Aren’t you going to help him?” she demanded.
“Oh no. Westcliff would never forgive me for interrupting. It’s his first tavern brawl.” Hunt’s gaze flickered over Lillian in friendly assessment. She swayed a little, and he placed a large hand on the center of her back and guided her to the nearby grouping of chairs. A cacophony of noise drifted from upstairs. There were heavy thudding sounds that caused the entire building to shake, followed by the noises of furniture breaking and glass shattering.
“Now,” Hunt said, ignoring the tumult, “if I may have a look at that remaining handcuff, I may be able to do something about it. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
451:told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing. ~ Bill Clinton, #NFDB
452:Environmentalists probably know already about “the Great Pacific garbage patch”—that mass of plastic, twice the size of Texas, floating freely in the Pacific Ocean. It is not actually an island—in fact, it is not actually a stable mass, only rhetorically convenient for us to think of it that way. And it is mostly composed of larger-scale plastics, of the kind visible to the human eye. The microscopic bits—700,000 of them can be released into the surrounding environment by a single washing-machine cycle—are more insidious. And, believe it or not, more pervasive: a quarter of fish sold in Indonesia and California contain plastics, according to one recent study. European eaters of shellfish, one estimate has suggested, consume at least 11,000 bits each year. The direct effect on ocean life is even more striking. The total number of marine species said to be adversely affected by plastic pollution has risen from 260 in 1995, when the first assessment was carried out, to 690 in 2015 and 1,450 in 2018. A majority of fish tested in the Great Lakes contained microplastics, as did the guts of 73 percent of fish surveyed in the northwest Atlantic. One U.K. supermarket study found that every 100 grams of mussels were infested with 70 particles of plastic. Some fish have learned to eat plastic, and certain species of krill are now functioning as plastic processing plants, churning microplastics into smaller bits that scientists are now calling “nanoplastics.” But krill can’t grind it all down; in one square mile of water near Toronto, 3.4 million microplastic particles were recently trawled. Of course, seabirds are not immune: one researcher found 225 pieces of plastic in the stomach of a single three-month-old chick, weighing 10 percent of its body mass—the equivalent of an average human carrying about ten to twenty pounds of plastic in a distended belly. (“Imagine having to take your first flight out to sea with all that in your stomach,” the researcher told the Financial Times, adding: “Around the world, seabirds are declining faster than any other bird group.”) Microplastics have been found in beer, honey, and sixteen of seventeen tested brands of commercial sea salt, across eight different countries. The more we test, the more we find; and while nobody yet knows the health impact on humans, in the oceans a plastic microbead is said to be one million times more toxic than the water around it. Chances are, if we started slicing open human cadavers to look for microplastics—as we are beginning to do with tau proteins, the supposed markers of CTE and Alzheimer’s—we’d be finding plastic in our own flesh, too. We can breathe in microplastics, even when indoors, where they’ve been detected suspended in the air, and do already drink them: they are found in the tap water of 94 percent of all tested American cities. And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. ~ David Wallace Wells, #NFDB
453:Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important.
It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have.
What kind of a human being is that? All of these mechanisms like testing, assessing, evaluating, measuring...they force people to develop those characteristics. The ones who don't do it are considered, maybe, 'behavioral problems' or some other deviance [...] these ideas and concepts have consequences. And it's not just that they're ideas, there are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them...the public relations industry, advertising, marketing, and so on. It's a huge industry, and it's a propaganda industry. It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being: the one who can maximize consumption and can disregard his actions on others. ~ Noam Chomsky,#NFDB
454:The Vain Question
Why should we court the storms that rave and rend,
Safe at our household hearth?
Why, starved and naked, without home or friend,
Unknowing whence we came or where we wend,
Follow from no beginning to no end
An uncrowned martyr's path?
Is it worth while to waste our all in vain?
To seek, and not to know?
To strive for something we can never gain,
To labour blindly for a wage of pain,
And crack our heartstrings with the stress and strain,
And reap no field we sow?
What does it matter whether love or hate,
Or praise or blame, be theirs
Who pass like shadows, with no time to wait
For understanding of the ways of fate,
Which makes the hopeless desert blossom late,
And kills good wheat with tares?
Why do we choose to suffer, when we might
Lie down to sleep and dream?
Is praise for men who try to do the right?
Is blame for him who shirks the deadly fight?
And whose the friendship that is heart's delight?
And whose the love supreme?
Wide do we set our sanctuary door
That fairest guest to greet,
And find too late, when we have shown our store,
The sacred places rudely trampled o'er,
Bereaved, profaned, and soiled for evermore
With tread of vulgar feet.
And nothing left to solace us but this,
At such a frightful cost A taste, a glimpse, the memory of a kiss;
Only a sense of what diviner bliss,
269
That might have been, we have contrived to miss;
Only what love has lost.
And brother-bond - the loyal comradeship
That comes to every call What worth the smiling eye, the warm hand-grip,
The benediction of the kindly lip?
Sickness, old age or poverty can strip
The value from them all.
And faith, embalmed in immemorial creed Once our supreme support,
Our staff and beacon to uphold and lead A light extinguished and a broken reed!
And where, O where, in bitter time of need,
Shall substitute be sought?
Wherefore this anguish of desire to see
That which concerns us not The evolution of the life to be,
The distant course, the final destiny
Of worlds and men - the ages wherein we
Shall have no part or lot?
Why not shut eyes of spirit and of brain
That can torment us thus?
Why not take something to assuage the pain,
And shut the doors and go to sleep again?
The Search may be successful or in vain,
What matters it to us?
Is it worth while, when house and home are here,
And we can dwell at ease,
To go forth, lonely, and in mortal fear,
To travel roads that lead not anywhere,
As bare of lamp or signpost, far or near,
And full of thorns, as these?
To leave the Good whereof we are possest,
To seek, in senseless grief,
For some divine but ever unknown Best,
And see no goal and find no place of rest -
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Is it worth while, on such a fruitless quest
To waste a life so brief?
We must not ask - we must not ask again.
We have to wait and see.
Press on, poor soul, along the path of pain
That is the one thing absolutely plain.
The last assessment of the loss and gain
Is not a task for thee.
~ Ada Cambridge,#NFDB
455: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? ~ Alan Sokal,#NFDB
456:By then the man had returned and set the kettle among the embers. Then he looked up, paused, then picked up his share of the bread and reached over to put it in front of me.
“That’s yours,” I said.
“You appear to need it more than I do,” he said, looking amused. “Go ahead. I won’t starve.”
I picked up the bread, feeling a weird sense of unreality: Did he expect me to be grateful? The situation was so strange I simply had to turn it into absurdity--it was either that or sink into fear and apprehension. “Well, does it matter if I starve?” I said. “Or do Galdran’s torturers require only plump victims for their arts?”
The man had started to unload something from the saddlebag at his side, but he stopped and looked up with that contemplative gaze again, his broad-brimmed black hat just shadowing his eyes. “The situation has altered,” he said slowly. “You must perceive how your value has changed.”
His words, his tone--as if he expected an outbreak of hysterics--fired my indignation. Maybe my situation was desperate, and sooner than later I was going to be having nightmares about it--but not for the entertainment of some drawling Court-bred flunky.
“He’ll try to use me against my brother,” I said in my flattest voice.
“I rather suspect he will be successful. In the space of one day your brother and his adherents attacked our camp twice. It would appear they are not indifferent to your fate.”
I remembered then that he had said something about an attack earlier, but I’d scarcely comprehended what he meant. “Do you know who was killed?” I asked quickly.
The firelight played over his face. He watched me with a kind of narrow-eyed assessment impossible to interpret. “You know them all, don’t you,” he commented.
“Of course I do,” I said. “You don’t know who--or you just won’t tell me, for some rock-headed reason?”
He smiled. “Your determined bravado is a refreshment to the spirit. But if you know them all by name, then the loss of each is immeasurably greater. Why did you do it? Did you really think you could take a few hundred ill-trained village people into war and expect anything but defeat?”
I opened my mouth to retort, then realized I’d be spoiling what little strategy we did have.
But then he said wryly, “Or did you expect the rest of the kingdom to follow your heroic example and rise up against the King?”
Which is, of course, exactly what we had expected.
“So they sit like overfed fowl and watch Galdran Merindar break the Covenant by making secret pacts to sell our woods overseas?” I retorted.
He paused in the act of reaching for the camp jug. “Break the Covenant? How do you know about that? I don’t recall you’ve ever been to Court.”
Tell him about Azmus, and the intercepted letter, and have him send minions to make certain both disappeared? No chance. “I just know. That’s all you need to know. But even if it weren’t true, Debegri would still go up to take the County of Tlanth by force. Can’t any of you Court people see that if it happens to us, it can happen to you? Or are you too stupid?”
“Possibly,” he said, still with that dispassionate amusement. “It’s also possible your…somewhat misguided actions are inspired by misguided sources, shall we say?”
“Say what you want,” I retorted. “It’s not like I can duff off in a huff if you’re impolite.”
He laughed softly, then shook his head. “I ought not to bait you. I apologize. ~ Sherwood Smith,#NFDB
457:Most people cannot stand being alone for long. They are always seeking groups to belong to, and if one group dissolves, they look for another. We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong with that. But what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us.
When we're in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to find "like-minded" people. But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissent opinion, as a member of a group.
It seems to me that this is something we have all experienced - something we take for granted, may never have thought about. But a great deal of experiment has gone on among psychologists and sociologists on this very theme. If I describe an experiment or two, then anyone listening who may be a sociologist or psychologist will groan, oh God not again - for they have heard of these classic experiments far too often. My guess is that the rest of the people will never have had these ideas presented to them. If my guess is true, then it aptly illustrates general thesis, and the general idea behind these essays, that we (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives.
A typical test, or experiment, on this theme goes like this. A group of people are taken into the researcher's confidence. A minority of one or two are left in the dark. Some situation demanding measurement or assessment is chosen. For instance, comparing lengths of wood that differ only a little from each other, but enough to be perceptible, or shapes that are almost the same size. The majority in the group - according to instruction- will assert stubbornly that these two shapes or lengths are the same length, or size, while the solitary individual, or the couple, who have not been so instructed will assert that the pieces of wood or whatever are different. But the majority will continue to insist - speaking metaphorically - that black is white, and after a period of exasperation, irritation, even anger, certainly incomprehension, the minority will fall into line. Not always but nearly always. There are indeed glorious individualists who stubbornly insist on telling the truth as they see it, but most give in to the majority opinion, obey the atmosphere.
When put as baldly, as unflatteringly, as this, reactions tend to be incredulous: "I certainly wouldn't give in, I speak my mind..." But would you?
People who have experienced a lot of groups, who perhaps have observed their own behaviour, may agree that the hardest thing in the world is to stand out against one's group, a group of one's peers. Many agree that among our most shameful memories is this, how often we said black was white because other people were saying it.
In other words, we know that this is true of human behaviour, but how do we know it? It is one thing to admit it in a vague uncomfortable sort of way (which probably includes the hope that one will never again be in such a testing situation) but quite another to make that cool step into a kind of objectivity, where one may say, "Right, if that's what human beings are like, myself included, then let's admit it, examine and organize our attitudes accordingly. ~ Doris Lessing,#NFDB
458:I closed my eyes, feeling sleep steal over me; but the pleasant lassitude fled when the tent flap opened again, this time pulled by a rough hand. Cold air swirled in. I blinked up at a burly helmeted soldier. He held the tent flap aside for a much lighter-boned man, who walked in wearing an anonymous black cloak. The guard let the flap fall, and I heard the gravel crunch under his boots as he took up position outside the tent.
The new arrival sank down onto the camp stool the healer had used, but he didn’t say anything, so for a short time we studied one another’s faces in the dim light. Large gray eyes surveyed me from my filthy scalp to my bandaged leg. I could read nothing in the man’s face beyond that leisurely assessment, so I just stared back, trying to gather my wits as I catalogued his features: a straight nose, the chiseled bones of someone at least Bran’s age, a long mouth with the deep corners of someone on the verge of a laugh. All this framed by long pale blond hair tied simply back, under a broad-brimmed but undecorated black hat. His rank was impossible to guess, but his job wasn’t--he had to be an interrogator.
So I braced myself for interrogation.
And watched his eyes register this fact, and those mouth corners deepen for just a moment. Then his face blanked again, his gaze resting on mine with mild interest as he said, “What is your name?”
It took a moment for the words to register--for me to realize he did not know who I was! His eyes narrowed; he had seen my reaction, then--and I stirred, which effectively turned my surprise into a wince of pain.
“Name?” he said again. His voice was vaguely familiar, but the vagueness remained when I tried to identify it.
“I am very much afraid,” he said presently, “that your probable future is not the kind to excite general envy, but I promise I can make it much easier if you cooperate.”
“Eat mud,” I croaked.
He smiled slightly, both mouth and eyes. The reaction of angerless humor was unexpected, but before I could try to assess it, he said, “You’ll have to permit me to be more explicit. If you do not willingly discourse with me, I expect the King will send some of his experts, who will exert themselves to get the information we require, with your cooperation or without it.” He leaned one hand across his knee, watching still with that air of mild interest--as if he had all the time in the world. His hand was long fingered, slim in form; he might have been taken for some minor Court scribe except for the callused palm of one who has trained all his life with the sword.
The import of his words hit me then, and with them came more fear--and more anger. “What is it you want to know?” I asked.
His eyes narrowed slightly. “Where the Astiars’ camp lies, and their immediate plans, will do for a start.”
“Their camp lies in their land…on which you are the trespasser…and their plans are to…rid the kingdom of…a rotten tyrant.” It took effort to get that out. But I was reasonably proud of my nasty tone.
His brows lifted. They were long and winged, which contributed to that air of faint question. “Well,” he said, laying his hands flat on his knees for a moment, then he swung to his feet with leisurely grace. “We have a fire-eater on our hands, I see. But then one doesn’t expect to find abject cowardice in spies.” He stepped toward the flap, then paused and said over his shoulder, “You should probably rest while you can. I fear you have an unpleasant set of interviews ahead of you.”
With that he lifted the flap and went out.
Leaving me to some very bleak thoughts. ~ Sherwood Smith,#NFDB
459:8-bn hype balloon bursts: Govt finds nothing against Hasan Ali The case dates back to May 5, 2007, when searches were conducted at various properties owned by Khan. Hasan Ali was arrested in March 2011. ( Picture source: Express archive ) Maneesh Chhibber | 718 words Arrested in March 2011, Pune-based stud farm owner and alleged hawala operator Hasan Ali Khan faces charges of money laundering and tax evasion. The Income Tax department has asked him to pay a whopping Rs 1.16 lakh crore. But, less than a week before it demits office, the UPA government at the Centre has finally acknowledged that its tax evasion cases against Khan “may not be sustainable”. Confidential finance ministry documents accessed by The Indian Express say that the government has little hope of winning any of the Income Tax cases or appeals pending before various authorities against Khan. After protracted exchanges with various foreign governments and banks, including UBS Zurich, where Khan was supposed to have illegally parked $ 8 billion, the finance ministry has come to the conclusion that most of the tax cases against him may not stand judicial scrutiny. The case dates back to May 5, 2007, when searches were conducted at various properties owned by Khan. A laptop recovered during the searches contained scanned copies of documents stating that Ali had accounts in UBS Zurich, with deposits in excess of US$ 8 billion. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) also provided a copy of Khan’s notarised statement which indicated that he had opened an account in UBS Singapore, in 1982 with an opening deposit of US$ 1.5 million. The account was allegedly opened on the recommendation of arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who was also involved in the Bofors case. However, in its response to the letters sent by the Indian government, UBS said that while Khan held three accounts in the bank for some time in 2001, there was a transaction of only about US$ 60,700 in one of the accounts. The bank also claimed that all the other documents seized in the raids, including the one that indicated a deposit of US$ 8 billion, were false and fabricated. In order to rule out foul play, the government took the unusual step of sending the letters and documents received from the UBS management to the Swiss authorities for “independent confirmation” and verification. In December last year, the Swiss government informed the Indian government that the letters sent by UBS were “true and authenticated”. This information, sources said, has changed the entire case. Similarly, Malaysian authorities have also informed the government that a company which was reported to be owned by Khan, as per the documents seized during the searches, “doesn’t exist”. It is learnt that information has also been sought from many other countries under the double taxation avoidance agreements. In most cases, the proceedings against Khan, his wife Rheema Hasan Ali Khan and his associate Kashinath Tapuriah are pending adjudication before the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT). As per the assessment orders passed by the Income Tax department for 2001-02 to 2010-11, Khan owes about Rs 37,000 crore as tax on concealed income. Add to this the interest (Rs 16,000 crore), penalty under Section 271 (1)(c) of the Income Tax Act (Rs 53,000 crore) and interest levied under Section 220 (2) of the Income Tax Act (Rs 10,000 crore) and the total sum that he is expected to pay is Rs 1.16 lakh crore. Khan’s wife has also been asked to pay Rs 97.33 crore, while a company which he owns — R M Investment & Trading Company Private Limited — has been directed to pay Rs 651.32 crore as unpaid tax, penalty and interest. Searches were also conducted at Tapuriah’s premises in Kolkata since the seized documents showed transfer of funds from UBS Zurich to Tapuriah’s wife Chandrika. The Income Tax department has asked Chandrika to pay Rs 47,000 crore, while Tapuriah has been told to pay over Rs 1,000 crore. In an opinion ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
460:Slickens
DRAMATIS PERSONAE.
HAYSEED _a Granger_
NOZZLE _a Miner_
RINGDIVVY _a Statesman_
FEEGOBBLE _a Lawyer_
JUNKET _a Committee_
_Scene_-Yuba Dam.
_Feegobble, Ringdivvy, Nozzle_.
NOZZLE:
My friends, since '51 I have pursued
The evil tenor of my watery way,
Removing hills as by an act of faith
RINGDIVVY:
Just so; the steadfast faith of those who hold,
In foreign lands beyond the Eastern sea,
The shares in your concern-a simple, blind,
Unreasoning belief in dividends,
Still stimulated by assessments which,
When the skies fall, ensnaring all the larks,
Will bring, no doubt, a very great return.
ALL (_singing_):
O the beautiful assessment,
The exquisite assessment,
The regular assessment,
That makes the water flow.
RINGDIVVY:
The rascally-assessment!
417
FEEGOBBLE:
The murderous assessment!
NOZZLE:
The glorious assessment
That makes my mare to go!
FEEGOBBLE:
But, Nozzle, you, I think, were on the point
Of making a remark about some rightsSome certain vested rights you have acquired
By long immunity; for still the law
Holds that if one do evil undisturbed
His right to do so ripens with the years;
And one may be a villain long enough
To make himself an honest gentleman.
ALL (_singing_):
Hail, holy law,
The soul with awe
Bows to thy dispensation.
NOZZLE:
It breaks my jaw!
RINGDIVVY:
It qualms my maw!
FEEGOBBLE:
It feeds my jaw,
It crams my maw,
It is my soul's salvation!
NOZZLE:
418
Why, yes, I've floated mountains to the sea
For lo! these many years; though some, they say,
Do strand themselves along the bottom lands
And cover up a village here and there,
And here and there a ranch. 'Tis said, indeed,
The granger with his female and his young
Do not infrequently go to the dickens
By premature burial in slickens.
ALL (_singing_):
Could slickens forever
Choke up the river,
And slime's endeavor
Be tried on grain,
How small the measure
Of granger's treasure,
How keen his pain!
RINGDIVVY:
'A consummation devoutly to be wished!'
These rascal grangers would long since have been
Submerged in slimes, to the last man of them,
But for the fact that all their wicked tribes
Affect our legislation with their bribes.
ALL (_singing_):
O bribery's great'Tis a pillar of State,
And the people they are free.
FEEGOBBLE:
It smashes my slate!
NOZZLE:
It is thievery straight!
419
RINGDIVVY:
But it's been the making of me!
NOZZLE:
I judge by certain shrewd sensations here
In these callosities I call my thumbs
thrilling sense as of ten thousand pins,
Red-hot and penetrant, transpiercing all
The cuticle and tickling through the nerves
That some malign and awful thing draws near.
(_Enter Hayseed._)
Good Lord! here are the ghosts and spooks of all
The grangers I have decently interred,
Rolled into one!
FEEGOBBLE:
Plead, phantom.
RINGDIVVY:
You've the floor.
HAYSEED:
From the margin of the river
(Bitter Creek, they sometimes call it)
Where I cherished once the pumpkin,
And the summer squash promoted,
Harvested the sweet potato,
Dallied with the fatal melon
And subdued the fierce cucumber,
I've been driven by the slickens,
Driven by the slimes and tailings!
All my family-my Polly
Ann and all my sons and daughters,
Dog and baby both included
All were swamped in seas of slickens,
420
Buried fifty fathoms under,
Where they lie, prepared to play their
Gentle prank on geologic
Gents that shall exhume them later,
In the dim and distant future,
Taking them for melancholy
Relics antedating Adam.
I alone got up and dusted.
NOZZLE:
Avaunt! you horrid and infernal cuss!
What dire distress have you prepared for us?
RINGDIVVY:
Were I a buzzard stooping from the sky
My craw with filth to fill,
Into your honorable body I
Would introduce a bill.
FEEGOBBLE:
Defendant, hence, or, by the gods, I'll brain thee!Unless you saved some turneps to retain me.
HAYSEED:
As I was saying, I got up and dusted,
My ranch a graveyard and my business busted!
But hearing that a fellow from the City,
Who calls himself a Citizens' Committee,
Was coming up to play the very dickens,
With those who cover up our farms with slickens,
And make himself-unless I am in error
To all such miscreants a holy terror,
I thought if I would join the dialogue
I maybe might get payment for my dog.
ALL (_Singing_):
O the dog is the head of Creation,
421
Prime work of the Master's hand;
He hasn't a known occupation,
Yet lives on the fat of the land.
Adipose, indolent, sleek and orbicular,
Sun-soaken, door matted, cross and particular,
Men, women, children, all coddle and wait on him,
Then, accidentally shutting the gate on him,
Miss from their calves, ever after, the rifted out
Mouthful of tendons that doggy has lifted out!
(_Enter Junket_.)
JUNKET:
Well met, my hearties! I must trouble you
Jointly and severally to provide
A comfortable carriage, with relays
Of hardy horses. This Committee means
To move in state about the country here.
I shall expect at every place I stop
Good beds, of course, and everything that's nice,
With bountiful repast of meat and wine.
For this Committee comes to sea and mark
And inwardly digest.
HAYSEED:
Digest my dog!
NOZZLE:
First square my claim for damages: the gold
Escaping with the slickens keeps me poor!
RINGDIVVY:
I merely would remark that if you'd grease
My itching palm it would more glibly glide
Into the public pocket.
FEEGOBBLE:
Sir, the wheels
422
Of justice move but slowly till they're oiled.
I have some certain writs and warrants here,
Prepared against your advent. You recall
The tale of Zaccheus, who did climb a tree,
And Jesus said: 'Come down'?
JUNKET:
Why, bless your souls!
I've got no money; I but came to see
What all this noisy babble is about,
Make a report and file the same away.
NOZZLE, RINGDIVVY, FEEGOBBLE, HAYSEED:
How'll that help _us_? Reports are not our style
Of provender!
JUNKET:
Well, you can gnaw the file.
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
4 Psychology
3 Science
3 Christianity
2 Yoga
1 Poetry
1 Philosophy
1 Occultism
1 Islam
1 Baha i Faith
3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
2 Swami Krishnananda
2 Jordan Peterson
2 Carl Jung
3 The Future of Man
2 The Study and Practice of Yoga
2 Maps of Meaning
1.00 - Main, #The Book of Certitude, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
We shall, if it be God's will and purpose, set forth erelong the measure of its assessment. He, verily, expoundeth whatsoever He desireth by virtue of His own knowledge, and He, of a truth, is Omniscient and All-Wise.
147
1.012 - Sublimation - A Way to Reshuffle Thought, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The culture of yoga does not tell us to reject, abandon, or to cut off anything if it is real, because the whole question is an assessment of values, and reality is, of course, the background of every value. What is achieved in spiritual education is a rise of consciousness from a lower degree of reality to a higher degree of reality, and in no degree is there a rejection of reality. It is only a growth from a lower level to a higher one. So when we go to the higher degree of reality, we are not rejecting the lower degree of reality, but rather we have overcome it. We have transcended it, just as when a student goes to a higher class in an educational career, that higher class transcends the lower degrees of kindergarten, first standard, second standard and third standard, but it does not reject them. Rejection is not what is implied; rather it is an absorption of values into a higher inclusive condition of understanding, insight and education.
Yoga is a process of education. The principles of dharma, artha and kama are preparatory processes for the readiness of the soul to catch the spirit of salvation. How can we get salvation from bondage if bondage is really there? A real bondage cannot be escaped; if bondage is real, we have to remain in it forever. We already take for granted that bondage is real, which is why we want to run away from it; but running away from real bondage is impossible. There is no escapism in yoga that is impossible. There is always a conditioning of the mind to the states of understanding. Again it must be emphasised that where we have not understood a principle, we will not be able to master it.
1.01 - Fundamental Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
It is perhaps unnecessary to reiterate that we cannot employ the methods derived from and dependent an our present consciousness structure to investigate different structures of consciousness, but will have to adapt our method to the specific structure under investigation. Yet if we relinquish a unitary methodology we do not necessarily regress to an unmethodological or irrational attitude, or to a kind of conjuration or mystical contemplation. Contemporary methods employ predominantly dualistic procedures that do not extend beyond simple subject-object relationships; they limit our understanding to what is commensurate with the present Western mentality. Even where the measurements of contemporary methodologies are based primarily an quantitative criteria, they are all vitiated by the problem of the antithesis between measure and mass (as we will discuss later in detail). Our method is not just a measured assessment, but above and beyond this an attempt at diaphany or rendering transparent. With its aid, whatever lies behind (past) and ahead of (future) the currently dominant mentality becomes accessible to the new subject-object relationship. Although this new relationship is no longer dualistic, it does not threaten man with a loss of identity, or with his being equated with an object.
Although this new method is still in its infancy, we are nevertheless compelled to make use of it.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
to a pattern of risk assessment of the area where the cat was encountered. Subjects poke their heads
out of the tunnel openings to scan the open area where the cat was presented, for minutes or hours
--
and out of the open area. These risk assessment activities appear to involve active gathering of
information about the possible danger source,126 providing a basis for a gradual return to nondefensive
behaviors.127 Active risk assessment is not seen during early post-cat exposure, when freezing and
avoidance of the open area are the dominant behaviors, but rises to a peak about 7-10 hours later, and
1.034 - Sheba, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
20. Satan was correct in his assessment of them. They followed him, except for a group of believers.
21. He had no authority over them; except that We willed to distinguish him who believes in the Hereafter, from him who is doubtful about it. Your Lord is Guardian over all things.
1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
open to our assessment and choice as we contemplate the future of
Mankind: a) pessimism or optimism; b) the optimism of with-
1.03 - THE ORPHAN, THE WIDOW, AND THE MOON, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[20] The quotation from Vigenerus bears no little resemblance to a long passage on the phases of the moon in Augustine.132 Speaking of the unfavourable aspect of the moon, which is her changeability, he paraphrases Ecclesiasticus 27 : 12 with the words: The wise man remaineth stable as the sun, but a fool is changed as the moon,133 and poses the question: Who then is that fool who changeth as the moon, but Adam, in whom all have sinned?134 For Augustine, therefore, the moon is manifestly an ally of corruptible creatures, reflecting their folly and inconstancy. Since, for the men of antiquity and the Middle Ages, comparison with the stars or planets tacitly presupposes astrological causality, the sun causes constancy and wisdom, while the moon is the cause of change and folly (including lunacy).135 Augustine attaches to his remarks about the moon a moral observation concerning the relationship of man to the spiritual sun,136 just as Vigenerus did, who was obviously acquainted with Augustines epistles. He also mentions (Epistola LV, 10) the Church as Luna, and he connects the moon with the wounding by an arrow: Whence it is said: They have made ready their arrows in the quiver, to shoot in the darkness of the moon at the upright of heart.137 It is clear that Augustine did not understand the wounding as the activity of the new moon herself but, in accordance with the principle omne malum ab homine, as the result of mans wickedness. All the same, the addition in obscura luna, for which there is no warrant in the original text, shows how much the new moon is involved. This hint of the admitted dangerousness of the moon is confirmed when Augustine, a few sentences later on, cites Psalm 71 : 7: In his days justice shall flourish, and abundance of peace, until the moon shall be destroyed.138 Instead of the strong interficiatur the Vulgate has the milder auferaturshall be taken away or fail.139 The violent way in which the moon is removed is explained by the interpretation that immediately follows: That is, the abundance of peace shall grow until it consumes all changefulness of mortality. From this it is evident that the moons nature expressly partakes of the changefulness of mortality, which is equivalent to death, and therefore the text continues: For then the last enemy, death, shall be destroyed, and whatever resists us on account of the weakness of the flesh shall be utterly consumed. Here the destruction of the moon is manifestly equivalent to the destruction of death.140 The moon and death significantly reveal their affinity. Death came into the world through original sin and the seductiveness of woman (= moon), and mutability led to corruptibility.141 To eliminate the moon from Creation is therefore as desirable as the elimination of death. This negative assessment of the moon takes full account of her dark side. The dying of the Church is also connected with the mystery of the moons darkness.142 Augustines cautious and perhaps not altogether unconscious disguising of the sinister aspect of the moon would be sufficiently explained by his respect for the Ecclesia-Luna equation.
[21] All the more ruthlessly, therefore, does alchemy insist on the dangerousness of the new moon. Luna is on the one hand the brilliant whiteness of the full moon, on the other hand she is the blackness of the new moon, and especially the blackness of the eclipse, when the sun is darkened. Indeed, what she does to the sun comes from her own dark nature. The Consilium coniugii143 tells us very clearly what the alchemists thought about Luna:
1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
acteristic of the human wave, a direct assessment of the advance
of our own group in terms of consciousness is possible to the prac-
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
Blanchard, D.C., Blanchard, R.J., & Rodgers, R.J. (1991). Risk assessment and animal models of anxiety.
In B. Olivier, J. Mos & J.L. Slangen (Eds.), Animal models in psychopharmacology (pp. 117-134).
1.06 - LIFE AND THE PLANETS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the evolution of Mankind. assessment.
escape?
1.07 - Medicine and Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
special emphasis. His assessment of anainnestic data may therefore turn
out to be very different from a purely medical one.
1.098 - The Transformation from Human to Divine, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Every progress is a progress in communion. It is not a progress merely in thought and clarity of understanding which are all very great things, no doubt, in the world, but they are nothing before yoga. We are not here for intensifying our analytic understanding or logical deductive knowledge of things, or for any kind of worldly genius. All that we regard as great in this world becomes nothing before this master technique of yoga, which is the precise reason why some cannot grasp even the first stage of yoga properly, because the very first step itself is a complete turning upside-down of the way of thinking. It is not continuing our present way of thinking that is called yoga. It is a complete transformation, a right-about turn of the entire attitude. This has to be grasped at the very outset. We are not becoming better and better human beings in yoga; we are becoming transformed and transfigured into a newer quality of being. It is not that the human nature continues, the human valuation continues and the human assessment of things continues nothing of the kind. There is a transfiguration of the human character altogether into a newer type of perception and experience. This is what is effected by communion.
Hence, the usual mistaken idea people may carry with them into the field of yoga that what they achieve in the higher stages of yoga is only an expanded, or perhaps a more intensified form of worldly happiness, worldly authority, worldly power or worldly acquisition is a great mistake, and nothing can be worse than that. We are not going to have enjoyments of a worldly kind in the progress of yoga, nor are we going to exercise power as we exercise it in the world of sense and ego. There is such a change as can be compared with the change from an animal to a human being, which cannot be regarded as merely a continuation of the animal species. When we rise from the animal kingdom of consciousness to the human level, we have not simply become better animals; that is not what has happened to us. We have become something quite different from animals. Are we only advanced animals just because we have evolved from the animal state? No. There is a change in intrinsic character. There is a transformation of quality. The human is different from the animal in the intrinsic structure itself, and not merely in the extrinsic expansion of sensory perception or egoistic affirmation.
1.11 - Higher Laws, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instants truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universes Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay. Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. Many an irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our lives.
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. That in which men differ from brute beasts, says Mencius, is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully. Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. A comm and over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the minds approximation to God. Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.
1.rmpsd - Its value beyond assessment by the mind, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
object:1.rmpsd - Its value beyond assessment by the mind
author class:Ramprasad
--
its value beyond assessment by the mind.
Nor can my sacred abode be sold at auction,
3.11 - Spells, #Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E, #unset, #Zen
Like the genius spell, the DM must be careful in adjudicating this spell. The answer to the question is always relevant and correct, although not necessarily complete. The answer can also be cryptic, in the form of a riddle or rhyme, depending on the DM's assessment of the situation and how potentially unbalancing the answer might be. In general, the answer will be a short phrase of no more than eight to ten words.
The material component is a gem of at least 500 gp value. This spell can be cast only once in any 24-hour period.
--
As with idea, the DM must be careful in adjudicating this spell. The answer to the question should always be relevant and correct, although not necessarily complete, and should not be unbalancing to the situation. The answer can also be cryptic, in the form of a riddle or rhyme, depending on the DM's assessment of the situation. In general, the answer will be a single word or a short phrase of no more than five words.
The material component is a gem of at least 50 gp value. This spell can be cast only once in any 12-hour period. Subsequent attempts to cast the spell result in no answer.
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Here the evidence is somewhat less well-established than that which was adduced in answer to the previous questions. Eysenck (1967) has amassed extensive evidence for the existence of two broad dimensions or factors of personality, called extraversion-introversion (E-I) and neuroticism (N). The former (E-I) is related to outgoingness and carefreeness; the latter (N) is related to emotional and autonomic instability. Both dimensions have been shown to have physiological correlates and a substantial genetic component, comparable to that found in mental abilities (Eysenck, 1967). Together, these factors, E-I and N, account for most of the individual differences variance in a wide variety of personality assessments. Certain combinations of these traits appear to have socially important consequences. For example, high extraversion combined with high neuroticism is significantly associated with antisocial behavior (Eysenck, 1964).
In a social system such as ours, that tends to sort out people according to their abilities, it seems most likely that those traits of personality and temperament which complement and reinforce the development of intellectual skills requiring persistent application, practice, freedom from emotional distraction, and resistance to mental fatigue and to boredom in the absence of physical activity, should become genetically assorted and segregated, and thereby be correlated, with those mental abilities requiring the most education for their full development--those abilities most highly valued in a technological culture. Thus ability and personality traits will tend to work together in determining individuals' overall capability in; the society. R. B. Cattell (1950, p. 98-99) has, in fact, shown that certain personality variables are correlated to the extent of about 0.3 to 0.5 with a general ability factor. Cattell concludes: "...there is a moderate tendency...for the person gifted with higher general ability, to acquire a more integrated character, somewhat more emotional stability, and a more conscientious outlook. He tends to become `morally intelligent' as well as `abstractly intelligent'"
--
The first step, then, in defining type specimens in this domain, is to select ecosystems with clearly discernible controllers such as, say, beaver valleys, and to compile the most reliable written, pictorial, and film records of them in existence. The next step is to draw up the ecosystem's web-of life, on the general pattern displayed in Figure II-14b. This involves clear assessment of each participant's Characteristic Number, relating each organismic and abiotic factor to the Periodic Table in each major respect. This will disclose role-duplications, triplications, and higher multiplications; reveal many unsuspected forms of indirect coaction; display gaps in our image of the web and lead us to fill them in. This procedure will yield us far more complete and detailed understanding of each participant's own ecosystem--its own organism habitat system--than we now have, and prepare the third step. This is to assess the quantities of the processes comprising the strategic organismic or abiotic factors' webs. This will, in turn, permit us to simulate strategic webs with a computer, modifying, introducing, or eliminating factors at will and predicting the consequences. This will permit empirical verification, with subsequent changes and improvements of our image (theory) until its accuracy is as great as necessary for feasible and effective control.
This project should coordinate large sectors of biological data and research, as the verification and completion of the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements did for chemical data after 1869. This is a pre-condition for technology assessment.
Pages 243-244
MoM References, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Blanchard, D.C., Blanchard, R.J., & Rodgers, R.J. (1991). Risk assessment and animal models of anxiety.
In B. Olivier, J. Mos & J.L. Slangen (Eds.), Animal models in psychopharmacology (pp. 117-134).
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
example, is Tolstoy's assessment of the French symbolists: 1
The productions of another celebrity, Verlaine, are not less
--- Overview of noun assessment
The noun assessment has 4 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (4) appraisal, assessment ::: (the classification of someone or something with respect to its worth)
2. assessment ::: (an amount determined as payable; "the assessment for repairs outraged the club's membership")
3. assessment ::: (the market value set on assets)
4. judgment, judgement, assessment ::: (the act of judging or assessing a person or situation or event; "they criticized my judgment of the contestants")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun assessment
4 senses of assessment
Sense 1
appraisal, assessment
=> classification, categorization, categorisation, sorting
=> basic cognitive process
=> process, cognitive process, mental process, operation, cognitive operation
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
assessment
=> charge
=> liabilities
=> possession
=> relation
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
assessment
=> monetary value, price, cost
=> value
=> worth
=> quality
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 4
judgment, judgement, assessment
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun assessment
3 of 4 senses of assessment
Sense 1
appraisal, assessment
=> critical appraisal, critical analysis
=> evaluation, valuation, rating
=> assay, check
=> acid test
=> reappraisal, revaluation, review, reassessment
=> underevaluation
Sense 3
assessment
=> tax assessment
Sense 4
judgment, judgement, assessment
=> justice
=> adjudication
=> disapproval
=> evaluation, rating
=> estimate, estimation
=> logistic assessment
=> value judgment, value judgement
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun assessment
4 senses of assessment
Sense 1
appraisal, assessment
=> classification, categorization, categorisation, sorting
Sense 2
assessment
=> charge
Sense 3
assessment
=> monetary value, price, cost
Sense 4
judgment, judgement, assessment
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun assessment
4 senses of assessment
Sense 1
appraisal, assessment
-> classification, categorization, categorisation, sorting
=> coordination
=> appraisal, assessment
=> attribution, ascription
=> attribution, ascription
=> cross-classification, cross-division
=> subsumption
Sense 2
assessment
-> charge
=> levy
=> encumbrance, incumbrance
=> assessment
Sense 3
assessment
-> monetary value, price, cost
=> average cost
=> marginal cost, incremental cost, differential cost
=> expensiveness
=> assessment
=> inexpensiveness
Sense 4
judgment, judgement, assessment
-> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> action
=> acquiring, getting
=> causing, causation
=> delivery, obstetrical delivery
=> departure, going, going away, leaving
=> discovery, find, uncovering
=> disposal, disposition
=> implementation, effectuation
=> egress, egression, emergence
=> equalization, equalisation, leveling
=> exhumation, disinterment, digging up
=> mitzvah, mitsvah
=> propulsion, actuation
=> recovery, retrieval
=> running away
=> touch, touching
=> nonaccomplishment, nonachievement
=> leaning
=> motivation, motivating
=> assumption
=> rejection
=> forfeit, forfeiture, sacrifice
=> derivation
=> activity
=> hire
=> wear, wearing
=> judgment, judgement, assessment
=> production
=> stay
=> residency, residence, abidance
=> inactivity
=> hindrance, hinderance, interference
=> stop, stoppage
=> group action
=> distribution
=> legitimation
=> waste, permissive waste
=> proclamation, promulgation
=> communication, communicating
=> speech act
--- Grep of noun assessment
assessment
logistic assessment
personality assessment
reassessment
special assessment
tax assessment
Wikipedia - Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment
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Wikipedia - Formative assessment -- Range of formal and informal assessment procedures conducted by teachers during the learning process
Wikipedia - Global Assessment of Functioning -- Scale to rate how well one is meeting various problems in living
Wikipedia - Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services -- 2019 report by the United Nations on mass extinction
Wikipedia - Global Rights Index -- Assessment by the International Trade Union Confederation
Wikipedia - Harcourt Assessment
Wikipedia - Health impact assessment
Wikipedia - Health technology assessment -- Field of policy analysis
Wikipedia - HM Melbourne Assessment Prison -- Remand and reception prison in Melbourne, Australia
Wikipedia - Homosexual Behaviour: Therapy and Assessment -- 1971 book by M. P. Feldman and M. J. MacCulloch
Wikipedia - IEEE 1680 -- IEEE standard for the assessment of environmental performance of electronic products
Wikipedia - ImpactMatters -- American charity assessment organization
Wikipedia - Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure
Wikipedia - Individual assessment
Wikipedia - Individual psychological assessment
Wikipedia - Industrial > Organizational Assessment
Wikipedia - Intelligence assessment -- Evaluation of sensitive state, military, commercial, or scientific information
Wikipedia - Internal dosimetry -- Internal ionising radiation dose assessment
Wikipedia - International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development -- Food politics
Wikipedia - IPCC Sixth Assessment Report -- Intergovernmental report on climate change
Wikipedia - Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment
Wikipedia - Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children
Wikipedia - Landscape assessment
Wikipedia - Library assessment
Wikipedia - Life-cycle assessment
Wikipedia - Life on Mars -- Scientific assessments on the microbial habitability of Mars
Wikipedia - Life on Titan -- Scientific assessments on the microbial habitability of Titan
Wikipedia - Life on Venus -- Scientific assessments on the microbial habitability of Venus
Wikipedia - Linear-on-the-fly testing -- Educational assessment and evaluation technique
Wikipedia - List of security assessment tools -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - Medical technology assessment
Wikipedia - Mold growth, assessment, and remediation
Wikipedia - National Biodiversity Assessment -- Periodical assessment and report on South African biodiversity
Wikipedia - National Climate Assessment -- Research initiative by the U.S. government
Wikipedia - Needs assessment
Wikipedia - Neuropsychological assessment
Wikipedia - Nursing assessment
Wikipedia - Office of Net Assessment
Wikipedia - Office of Technology Assessment
Wikipedia - Own risk and solvency assessment -- A system for assessing solvency needs of an insurance company
Wikipedia - PARCC -- Consortium for K-12 assessments in Mathematics and English
Wikipedia - Pearson Education -- Education publishing and assessment company
Wikipedia - Performance test (assessment) -- Performance test (assessment)
Wikipedia - Personality Assessment Inventory -- Multiscale inventory of personality and psychopathology
Wikipedia - Physiognomy -- Assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance
Wikipedia - Probabilistic risk assessment -- Systematic and comprehensive methodology to evaluate risks associated with a complex engineered technological entity
Wikipedia - Programme for International Student Assessment (2000 to 2012) -- Educational assessment and evaluation
Wikipedia - Programme for International Student Assessment -- Scholastic performance study by the OECD
Wikipedia - Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies -- Worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Wikipedia - Program process monitoring -- Assessment of the process of a program or intervention
Wikipedia - Psychological Assessment (journal)
Wikipedia - Psychological assessment
Wikipedia - Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority -- State education authority in Queensland, Australia
Wikipedia - Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface -- Ice-penetrating radar for Europa Clipper
Wikipedia - Rathenau Institute -- Institute for technology assessment in the Netherlands
Wikipedia - Rebecca Zwick -- Researcher in educational assessment and psychometrics
Wikipedia - Research Assessment Exercise
Wikipedia - Response to intervention -- Educational teaching and assessment model
Wikipedia - Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales
Wikipedia - Risk assessment -- Estimation of risk associated with exposure to a given set of hazards
Wikipedia - Risk management -- Set of measures for the systematic identification, analysis, assessment, monitoring and control of risks
Wikipedia - Risk-need-responsivity model -- Criminological risk assessment model
Wikipedia - Ronald A. Boxall -- Joint Staff Director for Force Structure, Resources, and Assessment
Wikipedia - Rorschach Performance Assessment System
Wikipedia - Rubric (academic) -- Scoring guide for assessment
Wikipedia - Self-assessment
Wikipedia - Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure
Wikipedia - Skill assessment -- Comparison and judgement of performance of a skill with the specified criteria for competence
Wikipedia - Skills assessment -- Skills assessment
Wikipedia - Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium -- Educational organizations based in the United States
Wikipedia - Society for Personality Assessment
Wikipedia - Sound quality -- Assessment of the audio output from an electronic device
Wikipedia - Standards-based assessment
Wikipedia - Summative assessment
Wikipedia - Technology assessment -- Research area dealing with trends in science and technology and related social developments
Wikipedia - Territory-wide System Assessment -- Hong Kong academic assessment
Wikipedia - Test (assessment) -- Procedure for measuring a subject's knowledge, skill, aptitude, physical fitness, or other characteristics
Wikipedia - Test (student assessment)
Wikipedia - The Assessment Centre
Wikipedia - Threat assessment
Wikipedia - Vulnerability assessment (computing)
Wikipedia - Wide Range Assessment of Memory and Learning, Second Edition
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:Content assessment/A-Class criteria -- Wikipedia information page
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:Content assessment/B-Class criteria -- Wikimedia template
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:Content assessment -- Wikipedia editing guideline
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Black Lives Matter/Assessment -- WikiProject task force page
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Ireland/Assessment -- Part of WP Ireland, with table of articles by quality and importance
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Assessment/Algebra -- historical document
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Assessment/Analysis -- historical document
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Music/Music genres task force/Assessment -- historical document
Wikipedia - Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit
Wikipedia - Windows System Assessment Tool
Wikipedia - Yearbook on International Communist Affairs -- An annual assessment of communist parties around the globe from 1966 to 1991.
Wikipedia - Your Disease Risk -- online health risk assessment tool
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1034868.Assessment_of_Couples_and_Families
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https://familypedia.wikia.org/wiki/Forum:Person_article_assessment
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Fitness_Assessment
https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Psychometric_assessment
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Mithraic_mysteries#Criticisms_and_reassessments_of_Cumont
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Regensburg_lecture/Assessment_of_the_lecture's_purpose
Integral World - Ken Wilber misunderstood, The misunderstanding and misinterpretation of key aspects of Ken Wilber's work in Hartelius and Ferrer's (2013) assessment, John Abramson
Integral World - Structuration theory and the assessment of technology, Nathalie Pang
Integral World - Integral Blair? A Preliminary Assessment of Tony Blair's Integral Leadership Qualities, Jose Vergara
selforum - the best assessment of science was done
Psychology Wiki - Category:Neuropsychological_assessment
Psychology Wiki - Consciousness#Assessment
Psychology Wiki - DiSC_assessment
Psychology Wiki - Educational_assessment_and_evaluation
Psychology Wiki - Guru#Assessment_and_criticism
Psychology Wiki - Neuropsychological_assessment
Psychology Wiki - Psychometric_assessment
Psychology Wiki - Risk_assessment
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Northpoint:_An_Assessment
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary:_Final_Assessment
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Tactical_Assessment
https://medicaldata.fandom.com/wiki/Clinical_Outcomes_Assessment
https://medicaldata.fandom.com/wiki/Methodological_Challenges_to_Outcomes_Assessment
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Threat_assessment
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Threat_assessment_system
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_Technology_Assessment_Directorate
https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/Bioterrorism_Security_Assessment_Alliance
https://scientology.fandom.com/wiki/Assessment
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Assessment
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/G3_Military_Assessment_Survey
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Risk_Assessment_(novel)
https://ufo.fandom.com/wiki/Maj_1st_Annual_Report%E2%80%94Military_Assessment
Sore ga Seiyuu! -- -- Gonzo -- 13 eps -- Web manga -- Slice of Life Comedy -- Sore ga Seiyuu! Sore ga Seiyuu! -- Dreaming of becoming a top-tier professional in the fast-paced, competitive world of voice acting, rookie Futaba Ichinose frantically scurries around, searching for auditions and performance sessions. Rubbing elbows with some of the biggest names in the industry, she tries to find her own unique voice and style. -- -- Along the way, she befriends two important allies: Ichigo Moesaki, an aspiring idol who claims to be a princess from another planet, and Rin Kohana, a cheerful child actress who tries her best to balance her career and school at the same time. Together, the girls brave the ups and downs of the entertainment industry—but as for Futaba, whose performance assessment at her agency is just around the corner, her career might be over sooner than expected! Sore ga Seiyuu! is a humorous and sincere celebration of the industry that gives anime its voice. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 45,078 7.05
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Educational_assessment_and_evaluation
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Technology_assessment
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Assessment_of_fossil_management_on_Federal_and_Indian_lands_(IA_assessmentoffoss27unit).pdf
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Assessment.png
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Assessments_tab.png
2009 Supervisory Capital Assessment Program
Abel Assessment
Ada Conformity Assessment Test Suite
Advanced Research and Assessment Group
Alternative assessment
Alternatives assessment
Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress
Architecture Design and Assessment System
Arctic Climate Impact Assessment
Assessment
Assessment and Evaluation Commission
Assessment centre
Assessment for Effective Intervention
Assessment in computer-supported collaborative learning
Assessment in higher education
Assessment of basic language and learning skills
Assessment of kidney function
Assessment of suicide risk
Assessment on Paramilitary Groups in Northern Ireland
Assessment Open Service Interface Definition
Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International
Auditory Hazard Assessment Algorithm for Humans
Australasian New Car Assessment Program
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority
Autoreview Car Assessment Program
Ballard Maturational Assessment
BC Assessment Authority
Biological terrain assessment
Biomarkers of exposure assessment
Bomb damage assessment
Book:Educational assessment
Calibrated probability assessment
California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
Cambridge Assessment Admissions Testing
Cambridge Assessment English
Cambridge Assessment International Education
Canadian Environmental Assessment Act
Career assessment
CDR computerized assessment system
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
Charity assessment
Chemical safety assessment
Children's Global Assessment Scale
Clear channel assessment attack
Clinical Institute Withdrawal Assessment for Alcohol
Colorado Student Assessment Program
Commission on Dental Competency Assessments
Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management
Committee on Sustainability Assessment
Common Educational Proficiency Assessment
Common Tasks for Assessment
Complete circumferential peripheral and deep margin assessment
Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture
Comprehensive geriatric assessment
Computer-aided assessment
Computer-based test interpretation in psychological assessment
Concise International Chemical Assessment Document
Confusion Assessment Method
Consensus-based assessment
Conservation Effects Assessment Project
Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems
Contaminated Land Assessment and Remediation Research Centre
Control self-assessment
Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context
Council for the Curriculum, Examinations & Assessment
Critical Assessment of Prediction of Interactions
Criticism of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report
Cross-battery assessment
Daily Assessment of Symptoms Anxiety
DasNaglieri cognitive assessment system
Dean-Woodcock Neuropsychological Assessment System
Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis
Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment
Digital repository audit method based on risk assessment
Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation
DISC assessment
DREAD (risk assessment model)
Early case assessment
Educational assessment
Electronic assessment
Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool
Environmental Assessment Institute
Environmental impact assessment
Environmental Impact Assessment Directive 2011
Environmental Monitoring and Assessment
Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979
Equality impact assessment
Essential Transportation Worker Identification Credential Assessment Act
European Network for Health Technology Assessment
European Practice Assessment
European Technology Assessment Group
Evidence-based assessment
Exposure assessment
External quality assessment
Facility condition assessment
Farmland Assessment Act of 1964
Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation
FDA Special Protocol Assessment
Federal Institute for Risk Assessment
Firefighting threat assessment matrix
Fixated Threat Assessment Centre
Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test
Floristic Quality Assessment
Focused assessment with sonography for trauma
Formative assessment
Four-step impact assessment
Fourth National Climate Assessment
Fugl-Meyer Assessment of sensorimotor function
Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy - General (FACT-G)
General Practitioner Assessment of Cognition
Global Assessment of Functioning
Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
Graduate Assessment Test
Groundwater Ambient Monitoring and Assessment Program
Harcourt Assessment
Health assessment
Health impact assessment
Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service
Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program
Health risk assessment
Health technology assessment
Health Technology Assessment (journal)
HM Melbourne Assessment Prison
Homeostatic model assessment
Homosexual Behaviour: Therapy and Assessment
Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority
Human and Ecological Risk Assessment
Human error assessment and reduction technique
Impact assessment
Impact Assessment Agency of Canada
Implementation maturity model assessment
Indian Network on Climate Change Assessment
Indigenous Peoples Climate Change Assessment Initiative
Individual psychological assessment
Information technology security assessment
Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis
Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment
Integrated assessment modelling
Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre
Intelligence assessment
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development
International Aviation Safety Assessment Program
International Center for Technology Assessment
International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care
Iowa Assessments
IPCC Fifth Assessment Report
IPCC First Assessment Report
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report
IPCC Second Assessment Report
IPCC Third Assessment Report
Joint ArmyNavy Assessment Committee
Journal of Career Assessment
Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management
Journal of Personality Assessment
Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment
Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment
Knowledge assessment methodology
Labour Market Impact Assessment
Landscape assessment
Land Use Evolution and Impact Assessment Model
Language assessment
Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers
Large-scale learning assessments
Legal assessments of the Gaza flotilla raid
Lexington Assessment and Reception Center
Library assessment
Life-cycle assessment
Local Economic Assessment Package
Managerial assessment of proficiency
Marine Ecosystem Assessment for the Southern Ocean
Marketing assessments
Medical-psychological assessment (Germany)
Medical technology assessment
Michigan Language Assessment
Militant Liberty: A Program of Evaluation and Assessment of Freedom
Model for assessment of telemedicine
MOSAIC threat assessment systems
Mouth assessment
Movement assessment
National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation
National Assessment and Accreditation Council
National Assessment of Educational Progress
National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy
National Assessments Bureau
National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management
National Climate Assessment
National Clinical Assessment Service
National Commission for Academic Accreditation and Assessment
National Curriculum assessment
National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme
National Intelligence Assessments on Infectious Diseases
Navajo Uranium Assessment and Kidney Health Project
Needs assessment
Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
Network theory in risk assessment
Neuropsychological assessment
New Car Assessment Program
New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge
Nursing assessment
Offender Assessment System
Office of National Assessments
Office of Net Assessment
Office of Technology Assessment
Ohio Achievement Assessment
Open-source software assessment methodologies
Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language
Own risk and solvency assessment
Pain assessment
Parent-Child Interaction Assessment-II
Peer assessment
Personality Assessment System
Phase I environmental site assessment
Preanesthetic assessment
Privacy Impact Assessment
Probabilistic risk assessment
Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board
Programme for International Student Assessment
Programme for International Student Assessment (2000 to 2012)
Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies
Property condition assessment
Psychiatric assessment
Psychological Assessment (journal)
Qualifications, Curriculum and Assessment Authority for Wales
Quantitative microbiological risk assessment
Quantitative mineral-resource assessments
Quantitative risk assessment software
Rent assessment committee
Research Assessment Exercise
Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales
Risk assessment
Risk assessment for organic swine health
Role-based assessment
RPA Assessment
Science and Technology Options Assessment
Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion
Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network
Self-assessment
Self-assessment (disambiguation)
Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board
Skill assessment
Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
Social impact assessment
Society for Personality Assessment
SOCRATES (pain assessment)
SOX 404 topdown risk assessment
Special assessment tax
Speech and language assessment
Standards-based assessment
Strategic environmental assessment
Strategic Environmental Assessment (Denmark)
Summative assessment
Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services
Tax assessment
Teacher quality assessment
Technology assessment
Test (assessment)
Texas Assessment of Academic Skills
Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills
The Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach
The Quality of Life Assessment of Growth Hormone Deficiency in Adults Measure
Timeline Followback Method Assessment (Alcohol)
Transformative assessment
United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination
University of California, San Diego Performance-Based Skills Assessment
User:Arb/WikiProject Rail transport in Jamaica/Assessment
User:Noclip/Assessment overhaul
U.S. Government Assessment of the Syrian Government's Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013
Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority
Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion
Vulnerability assessment
Wide Range Assessment of Memory and Learning, Second Edition
Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit
Windows System Assessment Tool
Wind resource assessment
Work Capability Assessment
World Water Assessment Programme
Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community
Wound assessment
Writing assessment
Writing center assessment
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