The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins

• Reality is everything that exists.
• Reality doesn’t just consist of the things we already know about: it also includes things that exist but that we don’t know about yet--and won’t know about until some future time, perhaps when we have built better instruments to assist our five senses.
• We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.
• We come to know what is real, then, in one of three days. We can detect it directly, using our five senses; or indirectly, using our senses aided by special instruments such as telescopes and microscopes; or even more indirectly, by creating models to see whether they successfully predict things that we can see with or without the aid of instruments. Ultimately, it always comes back to our senses, one way or another.
• Magic is a slippery word: it is commonly used in three different ways, and the first thing I must do is distinguish between them. I’ll call the first one ‘supernatural magic’, the second one ‘stage magic’ and the third one ‘poetic magic’.
• Supernatural magic is the kind of magic we find in myths and fairy tales.
• Stage magic, by contrast, really does happen, and it can be great fun. Or at least, something really happens, though it isn’t what the audience think it is.
• The third meaning of magic is the one I mean in my title: poetic magic. [...] In this sense, ‘magical’ simply means deeply moving, exhilarating: something that gives us goosebumps, something that makes us feel more fully alive.
• To claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its every being explained.
• [...] The scientific method has been responsible for the huge advances in knowledge we have enjoyed over the last 400 years or so.
• To say something happened supernaturally is not just to say ‘We don’t understand it’ but to say ‘We will never understand it, so don’t even try’.
• If something were to happen that went against our current understanding of reality, scientists would see that as a challenge to our present model, requiring us to abandon or at least change it. It is through such adjustments and subsequent testing that we approach closer and closer to what is true.
• The whole history of science shows us that things once thought to be the result of the supernatural--caused by gods, demons, witches, spirits, curses and spells--actually do have natural explanations: explanations that we can understand and test and have confidence in.
• There is absolutely no reason to believe that horse hints for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be causes by agry deities, as people once believed they were.
• Complex organisms--like humans, crocodiles, and brussels sprouts--did not come about suddenly, in one fell swoop, but gradually, step by tiny step, so that what was there after each step was only a little bit different from what was already there before.
• Simply by choosing which frogs breed and which do not, we can make a new kind of frog.
• The magic of reality is neither supernatural nor a trick, but--quite simply--wonderful. Wonderful, and real. Wonderful because real.
• Stories are fun, and we all love repeating them. But when we hear a colorful story, whether it is an ancient myth or a modern ‘urban legend’ whizzing around the internet, it is also worth stopping to ask whether it--or any part of it--is true.
• This may surprise you, but there never was a first person--because every person had to have parents, and those parents had to be people too.
• A thought experiment is an experiment in your imagination.
• Your 195-million-greats-grandfather was a fish.
• Fossils are made of stone. They are stones that have picked up the shapes of dead animals or plants. The great majority of animals die with no hope of turning into a fossil. The trick, if you want to be a fossil, is to get yourself buried in the right kind of mud or silt, the kind that might eventually harden to form ‘sedimentary rock’.
• DNA is the genetic information that all living creatures carry in each of their cells. The DNA is spelled out along massively coiled ‘tapes’ of data, called ‘chromosomes’. These chromosomes really are very like the kind of data tapes you’d feed into an old-fashioned computer, because the information they carry is digital and is strung along them in order.
• All genes, in every animal, plant and bacterium that has ever been looked at, are coded messages for how to build the creature, written in a standard alphabet.
• What is a fact beyond all doubt is that wef share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this becomes some genres are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria.
• Animals belong to different species if they don’t breed together.
• In every generation, sexual reproduction sees to it that genes are shuffled.
• Natural selection nudges evolution in a purposeful direction: namely, the direction of survival.
• A scientific model is a way of thinking about how things might be.
• Scientists don’t stop at proposing a model: they then go on to test it.
• A successful model is one whose predictions came out right, especially if they survive the test of experiment. And if the predictions come out right, we hope it means that the model probably represents the truth, or at least a part of the truth.
• Many myths and legends from all around the world have the same odd feature: a particular incident happens once, and then, for reasons never explained, the same thing goes on happening again and again forever.
• For what it is worth, the Earth is actually closest to the sun (perihelion) in January and furthest (aphelion) in July, but the elliptical orbit is so close to circular that it makes no noticeable difference.
• The sun is  a star. It’s no different from lots of other stars, except that we happen to be near it so it looks much bigger and brighter than the others.
• The larger any object is, the stronger the gravitational pull towards its center. Everything pulls everything by gravity.
• According to the modern version of the big bang model, the entire observable universe exploded into existence between 13 and 14 billion years ago.
• The ‘observable universe’ means everything for which we have any evidence at all. It is possible that there are other universes that are inaccessible to all our sense and instruments.
• No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
• If something happens that appears to be unexplainable by science, you can safely conclude one of two things. Either it didn’t really happen (the observer was mistaken, or was lying, or was tricked); or we have exposed a shortcoming in present-day science. If present-day science encounters an observation, or an experimental result, that it cannot explain, then we should not rest until we have improved our science so that it can provide an explanation.

Programming Arduino: Next Steps by Simon Monk

• Note that any program stored on the device is retained because it is kept in nonvolatile flash memory--that is, memory that remembers even when the device is not powered on.
• Because your Arduino is connected to your computer by USB, you can send messages between the two using a feature of the Arduino IDE called the serial monitor.
• We are now in the Arduino’s realm. The Arduino has a small resident program installed on every microcontroller that is included with its board. THis program is called a bootloader. The bootloader actually runs very briefly every time an Arduino is reset.
• The Arduino boards all come with a six-pin header that can be used to program the Arduino directly using AVR Studio. In fact, some boards come with two six-pin headers: one for the main processor and one for the USB interface, so be careful to connect to the right one.
• The Arduino installation folder contains bootloader hex files that can be flashed onto an ATmega 28 using AVR Studio. You will find these files in the hardware/arduino/bootloaders folder. There you will find hex files for all sorts of different hardware.
• Interrupts allow microcontrollers to respond to events without having to poll continually to see if anything has changed. In addition to associating interrupts with certain pins you can also use timer-generated interrupts.
• While inside an ISR, interrupts are automatically turned off. This prevents the potential confusion caused by ISRs interrupting each other, but it has some side effects.
• As a rule of thumb, you can calculate the number of hours that a battery will last before it is discharged by dividing the capacity in milliamp hour (mAh) by the number of milliamps (mA) being drawn.
• The ultimate way to save power on your Arduino is to put it to sleep when it doesn’t have anything useful to do.
• There are two methods to wake up an Arduino. One is to use an external interrupt and the other is to set a timer to wake the Arduino after a period of time.
• The best ways to minimize current consumption are to:
• Put the microcontroller to sleep when it’s not doing anything.
• Run the Arduino at a lower voltage.
• Run the Arduino at a lower clock frequency.
• The RAM in an Arduino is only used to hold the contents of variables and other data relating to the running of the program. RAM is not persistent; that is, when the power is disconnected, the RAM is cleared. If the program needs to store persistent data, then it must write that data to EEPROM. The data can then be read back when the sketch restarts.
• A really good way to reduce memory usage is to make sure that any constant variables are declared as such. To do this, just put the word const in front of the variable declaration. Knowing that the value will never change allows the compiler to substitute tin the value in place of the variable, which saves space.
• Recursion is a technique where a function calls itself. Recursion can be a powerful way of expressing and solving a problem. In functional programming languages such as LISP and Scheme, recursion is used a great deal.
• Every time you call a function, a stack frame is created. A stack frame is a small memory record that includes storage space for parameters and local variables used by the function, as well as a return addresses that specifies the point in the program from which execution should continue when the function has finished running and returned.
• Any use of Serial.println pulls about 500 bytes of library code into the sketch. So, once you are convinced that the sketch is working, remove or comment out these lines.
• The malloc (memory allocate) command allocates memory from an area of RAM called the heap. Its argument is the number of bytes to be allocated.
• The danger with dynamic memory allocation is that you can easily get in a situation where memory is allocated by not released, so then the sketch unexpectedly runs out of memory. Running out of memory can cause the Arduino to hang. If all the memory is allocated statically, however, this cannot happen.
• The contents of any variable used in an Arduino sketch will be cleared and lost whenever the Arduino loses power or is reset. If you need to store values persistently, you need to write them a byte at a time into EEPROM memory. The Arduino Uno has 1kB of EEPROM memory.
• EEPROM contents are not cleared by uploading a new sketch; once written, EEPROM values can only be changed by writing a new value on top of the old value. So if this is the first time that the sketch has been run, then there is no way to know what value might be left in EEPROM by a previous sketch.
• EEPROM is slow to read and write (about 3ms). It is also only guaranteed to be reliable for 100,000 write cycles before it starts suffering from amnesia. For this reason, you need to be careful not to write to it every time around a loop.
• The flash memory in an Arduino can only be written to about 100,000 times before it becomes useless.
• The flash contains your program, so, if you miscalculate and write over the program, very strange things could happen.
• The easiest way to create flash-stored string constants is to use the F() function.
• By putting the PROGMEM directive in front of the array declaration, you ensure that it is only stored in flash memory. To read value out of it, however, you now have to use the function pgm_read_word from the avr/pgmspace library.
• The I2C interface bus is a standard for connecting microcontrollers and peripherals together. I2C is sometimes referred to as Two Wire Interface (TWI). All the Arduino boards have at least one I2C interface to which you can attach a wide range of peripherals.
• I2C uses two wires to transmit and receive data. These two lines are called the Serial Clock Line (SCL) and the Serial Data Line (SDA).
• The baud rate is the number of signal transitions per second, which would be the same as the number of bits per second, were it not for the fact that a byte of data may have start, end, and parity bits.
• The serial commands are not contained in a library, so you do not need an include command in your sketch.
• The essence of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is to digitize a signal using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), manipulate it in some way, and then generate an analog output signal using a digital-to-analog converter (DAC).
• In general, Arduinos are not the ideal devices for DSP. They cannot capture analog signals particularly fast, and their digital output is limited to PWM. The exception to this is the Arduino Due, which, as well as having lots of ADCs also has a fast processor and two tru DACs. Therefore, the Due’s hardware is sufficiently good enough to stand a fighting chance digitizing a stereo audio signal and doing something with it.

The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne & Jerry Lucas

• All memory, whether trained or untrained, is based on association.
• One of the fundamentals of a trained memory is what we all Original Awareness. Anything of who you are Originally Aware cannot be forgotten. And, applying our systems of association will force Original Awareness. Observation is essential to Original Awareness--anything you wish to remember must first be observed. Using association will take care of that, too.
• It is always easier to remember things that have meaning than it is to remember things that do not.
• We believe that there are three basic learning skills:
• The search for information
• Remembering information
• Applying the information
• Here’s a basic memory rule: You can remember any new piece of information if it is associated to something you already know or remember,
• If you know how to consciously associate anything you want to remember to something you already know, you’ll have a trained memory.
• In order to remember any new piece of information, it must be associated to something you already know or remember in some ridiculous ways.
• The link system is used to remember things in sequence only, and there are many things that must be remembered, or leaders, in sequence.
• The one problem you may have in linking, only at first, is in making your pictures ridiculous. There are four simple rules to help you do this right from the start.
• The easiest rule to apply is the rule of substitution.
• Another rule is out of proportion.
• Another rule is exaggeration.
• And, try to get action into your pictures.
• Making the pictures ridiculous is what enables you to really see them; a logical picture is usually too vague. Once you really see the ridiculous picture, it does register in your mind.
• The substitute word concept can be applied to any seemingly abstract material. Basically, it’s this: when you hear or see a word or phrase that seems abstract or intangible to you, think of something--anything-that sounds like, or reminds you of, the abstract material and can be pictured in your mind.
• To repeat, you do have to use a bit of imagination, and the more often you form conscious associations, the easier it will become because you will be improving your imagination as you improve your memory.
• Trying to find a substitute word for anything forces you to think about it, to concentrate on it as you normally would not.
• Probably the worst mistake you can make is to try to memorize a speech word for word. First of all, it isn’t really necessary. [...] Secondly, memorizing the speech word for word will make it sound that way when you deliver it--memorized. And, finally, when you memorize a speech word for word, you’re taking the chance of fumbling over one word you can’t remember.
• The best way to deliver a speech is to talk it in your own words, thought for thought. A speech is a sequence of thoughts; if the thoughts are out of sequence, the speech won’t make much sense.
• Simply link keywords as you read or listen. Applied to reading material, the idea forces you to read actively, with concentration; applied to lectures, it does the same thing.
• Once you definitely know the sequence of thoughts, the words tend to take care of themselves. If you know the thought, the worst that can happen is that you’ll say the line a bit differently from the way it was written; it’s when you don’t know the thought that you can really “go up”.
• The substitute word idea can be applied to any word of any language. There is no word that does not sound like, or make you think of, something in your own language.
• First impressions are usually lasting impressions, and what is outstanding on someone’s face now will, most likely, seem outstanding when you see that face again. That’s important; but more important is the fact that you’ve really looked at that face. You’re etching that face into your memory by just trying to apply the system.
• If your mind is “absent” when performing an action, there can be no observation; more important, there can be no original awareness.
• The solution to the problem of absent mindedness is both simple and obvious: all you have to do is to be sure to think of what you’re doing during the moment in which you’re doing it.
• The problem of remembering numbers, probably the most difficult of all memory chores, can be solved by learning a simple phonetic alphabet, consisting of just ten pairs of digits and sounds.

Designing Embedded Hardware by John Catsoulis

• Embedded computers are far more numerous than desktop systems, but far less obvious.
• Embedded hardware is often much simpler than a desktop system, but it can also be far more complex too.
• All data is stored in the computer as numbers.
• The bootloader is a special program run by the processor that reads the operating system from disk and places it in memory so that the processor may then run it.
• A microprocessor is a processor implemented on a single, integrated circuit.
• A microcontroller is a processor, memory, and some I/O devices contained within a single, integrated circuit, and intended for use in embedded systems.
• There is no real difference between data and instructions. A processor can be directed to begin execution at a given point in memory, and it has no way of knowing whether the sequence of numbers beginning at that point is data or instructions.
• Data has no inherent meaning. [...] Meaning comes from how these numbers are treated under the execution of a program.
• Data and instructions share the same memory.
• Memory is a linear (one-dimensional) array of storage locations.
• The internal data storage of the processor is known as its registers. The processors has a limited number of registers, and these are used to hold the current data/operands that the processor is manipulating.
• Interrupts (also known as traps or exceptions in some processors) are a technique of diverting the professor from the execution of the current program so that it may deal with some event that has occured.
• Interrupts free the processor from having to continuously check the I/O devices to determine whether they require service. [...] The I/O devices will notify it when they require attention by asserting one of the processor's interrupts.
• The interrupt vector is the address at which an interrupt service routine (ISR) lies.
• There are two ways of telling when an I/O device is ready for the next sequence of dta to be transferred. The first is busy waiting or polling, where the processor continuously checks the device’s status register until the device is ready. A better way is for the device to generate an interrupt to the processor when it is ready for a transfer to take place.
• The advantage of interrupt polling over ordinary polling is that the polling occurs only when there is a need to service a device.
• Polling interrupts is suitable only in systems that have a small number of devices; otherwise, the processor will spend too long trying to determine the source of the interrupt.
• A software interrupt is generated by an instruction. It is the lowest-priority interrupt and is generally used by programs to request a service to be performed by the system software (operating system or firmware).
• One main disadvantage of CISC is that the processors themselves get increasingly complicated as a consequence of supporting such a large and diverse instruction set.
• RISC processors implement what is known as a “load/store” architecture. This means that the only instructions that actually referenced memory are load and store. In contrast, many (most) instructions on a CISC processor may access or manipulate memory.
• DSPs have special hardware well suited to numerical processing of arrays. They often have hardware looping, whereby special registers allow for and control the repeated execution of an instruction sequence. This is also often known as zero-overhead looping, since no conditions need to be explicitly tested by the software as part of arithmetic operations.
• Many processors have instruction and/or data caches, which store recent memory accesses. These caches are (often, but not always) internal to the processors and are implemented with fast memory cells and high-speed data paths. Instruction execution normally runs out of the instruction cache, providing for fast execution.
• The primary purpose of ROM within a system is to hold the code (and sometimes data) that needs to be present at power-up. Such software is generally known as firmware and contains software to initialize the computer by placing I/O devices into a know state.
• It is common for many microcontrollers to incorporate a small EEPROM on-chip for holding system parameters. This is especially useful in embedded systems and may by used for storing network addresses, configuration settings, serial numbers, servicing records, and so on.
• The address space of the processor can contain devices other than memory. These are input/output devices (I/O devices, also known as peripherals) and are used by the processor to communicate with the external world.
• There are three main ways in which data may be exchanged with the external world: programmed I/O, interrupt-driven I/O, direct memory access (DMA).
• Using DMA bypasses the processor by setting up a channel between the I/O device and the memory. Thus, data is read from the I/O device and written into memory without the need to execute code to perform the transfer on a byte-by-byte basis.
• Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) computers are highly parallel machines, employing large arrays of simple processing elements. In an SIMD machine, each processing elements has a small amount of local memory.
• The other major form of parallel machine is the Multiple-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) computer. These machines are typically coarsely grained collections of semi-autonomous processors, each with their own local memory and local programs.
• MIMD computers can be one of two types: shared-memory MIMD and message-passing MIMD.
• The most common I/O is digital I/O, commonly called general-purpose I/O, or GPIO. These are ports that may be configured by software, on a pin-by-pin basis, as either a digital input or digital output.
• Most microcontrollers have other subsystems besides digital I/O but provide the ability to convert the other subsystems to general-purpose digital I/O if the functionality of the other subsystems is not required.
• Registers are the internal (working) storage for the processor. The number of registers varies significantly among processor architectures.
• Assembly-language instructions equate directly to their machine code counterparts. SInce machine code is difficult to read and write (for a human), a mnemonic is used to represent the opcode.
• The inconvenience of little endian is that data appears “backwards” in the computer’s memory if you display a block of locations.
• Disassembly is the conversion from a sequence of machine code back to the mnemonics that represent that code. This is done when we have a machine code program (perhaps written by someone else) and we want to know what it does and how it works.
• Absolute addressing is used when we branch or jump to some code that we know will always be at a given address.
• Many processors implement one or more stacks, which serve as temporary storage in external memory. The processor can push a value from a register on the stack to preserve it for later use. The processor retrieves this value by popping from the stack back into a registers. In some processor architectures, popping is also known as pulling.
• Most processors have a special register known as a stack pointer, which references the next free location on the stack. Some processors implement more than one stack and so have more than one stack pointer.
• A better way to provide a fixed delay is to use a hardware timer, either as an internal peripheral to the microcontroller (and most have them) or as an external device. The timer generates an interrupt to the processor, and this gives a much more precise, reliable, and portable way of implementing a timing delay.
• Forth is an extensible, highly interactive, stack-based language. It is extremely efficient and extremely versatile. In addition, Forth is relatively easy to “bring up” on a virgin machine, and the structure and functionality of the language make it ideal for debugging bth system hardware and software. In fact, it is fantastic for debugging new hardware.
• Forth is predominantly written in Forth and is interpreted by itself at runtime. The virtual machine running Forth is typically coded directly in the assembler both for speed operation and to take advantage of the characteristics of the target computer directly.
• Forth is at once a compiler, an interpreter, and, in a fashion, an operating system too.
• Forth uses threaded code, which is a list of subroutine identifiers (words). Each word within a program is called in turn, thus producing the sequence of running code. The interpreter is responsible for calling words as appropriate and is capable of only three operations.
• Forth uses two stacks for its operation. The first stack is the parameter stack used to pass data between words. The second stack is the return stack and holds the return addresses for currently running words. Typically, the return stack is the system stack of the processor.
• The beauty of Forth is its ability to build upon itself, allowing you to test as you go. To this end, keep your Froth words to three or four lines of code where possible.
• Keep it simple and focus on what you’re trying to achieve. A simple Forth word that solves a specific, simple problem is better than a complicated do-all word that is difficult to write and hard to debug.
• Most peripherals and memory chips have a chip-select input. Chip selects are important since there are many memory and peripheral chips within a computer system. It is through the chip select that the processor will enable the chip so that it can write data to it or read data from it.
• Diodes are useful for removing negative voltages from a signal, a process known as rectification.
• Most of the current usage of a digital system occurs during transitions of state--in other words, during the clock edges. The more frequent the clock edges, the more the average current usage goes up. Therefore, the faster a processor runs, the more power it consumes.
• Ignoring device timing is a sure way of guaranteeing that your system will not work.
• If you want to design and build reliable systems, remember that timing is everything.
• A transition is never instant; it can be several nanoseconds in duration, and there is considerable variation between different devices.
• If possible, a very useful thing to include in your design is a serial interface, even if you don’t need a serial port for the final application. A serial port is extremely useful for printing out diagnostic and statue information from the system, and can be an indispensible diagnostic tool.
• The other mandatory debugging tool is the status LED. A flashing LED can tell you volumes about a machine being tested if the LED is used intelligently by the software and programmer. The more status LEDs you have, the better life will be.
• Batteries are easy to use. The only caveat is to ensure that the battery (or batteries) you have chosen can supply enough current at the right voltage. WIth the right choice of battery and a carefully designed system, you can achieve extended operation over very long periods.
• An embedded computer may need only an average supply of 20 mA but may require as much as 100 mA at peak loads. This is especially true of systems using flash memory, which may require high currents during write operations.
• A voltage regulator is a semiconductor device that converts an input DC voltage (usually a range of input voltages) to a fixed output DC voltage. They are used to provide a constant supply voltage within a system.
• There are three types of DC-DC converters: linear regulators, which produce lower voltages than the supply voltage; switching regulators that can step up (boost), step down (buck), or invert the input voltage; and charge pumps, which can also step up, step down, or invert the supply voltage, but with limited current-drive capability.
• Digital systems are inherently analog in operation. Digital signals suffer degradation and nose due to analog effects present in the system. Spurious noise or reflections from nearby electrical machinery or radio transmission can induce signals within your circuit that can cause false events to occur, or even prevent a digital system from functioning at all.
• A ground place is a large conducting surface that can serve as the current return path for all loops in the circuit. A ground plane is often implemented as a complete, internal PCB layer.
• Capacitive coupling is the coupling of electric fields. A signal on one wire, through its associated electric field, can capacitley induce a phantom “signal” in an adjacent signaal line. This is known as crosstalk in digital systems. If not signed correctly, the magnitude of the crosstalk in a system can be significant and can easily cause a crash.
• The decoupling capacitors should be placed as close as possible to the power points of the devices. Surface-mount capacitors have very low inductance connections, and so are preferable.
• Ground bounce is ringing (oscillation) on signal lines caused when one or more outputs on the same device are being switched from high to low. This ring can be of significant amplitude and can adversely affect the system.
• You need to consider the effect that several changing outputs may have on your circuit.
• If you’re using a grounding mat, dont’ forget to take your embedded system off it before powering up. The grounding mat is conductive, and powering up a system while it is in contact with the mat can be disastrous.
• When you’re developing your embedded system, it’s best to start with a development kit from the processor’s manufacture.
• Soldering is very easy to do well, and very easy to do badly.
• It is possible to build very simply circuits by just soldering the components together in free space. [...] This technique is variously referred to as a rat’s nest, bird’s nest, or “what the hell is that?”
• As a general rule, breadboards are bad news, and their use should be avoided at all costs. They suffer from excessive capacitance, crosstalk, and noise susceptibility and, as such, are completely inappropriate for microprocessor system construction.
• Wire Wrapping is a very fast prototyping technique and is very robust and reliable. [...] WIre wrapping is good for prototyping or for building one-off designs.
• PCBs can be either single-sided (one layer), double-sided (two layers), or 4-layered, 6-layer, 8-layered, 12-layered, or more. The more layers you have, the easier it is to route your interconnections, but the costs of fabrication go up considerably with extra layers.
• [PCB] Tracks are used to interconnect components. Track width is expressed in thousands of an inch (“mils”) of in millimeters. Tracks can be of varying thickness, and often a PCB will have different widths for different tracks. The fatter the track, the more current it can carry. The thinner the track, the easier it is to fit more tracks in a given space, and, therefore, the easier it is to route the PCB.
• Tracks should always change direction by 45-degree turns.
• The first thing to note when laying out a PCB is that someone is going to have to assemble it.
• Whatever you decide about orientation, group related components together.
• Any analog circuitry should be as far from the power connector and its support components as possible. By placing chips into functional groups, routing is made easier.
• In high-speed systems, you need power and ground planes that are continuous. In other words, you need plans that cover the entire PCB with no breaks. Any break in the power or ground plane makes the current-loop area larger, and this can increase inductance and radiation. This means that for high-speed systems, you really need to use four or more layers on the PCB.
• All power and ground traces should be as fat as possible, and, if feasible, separate power and ground planes (layers) should be used. The power ground (ground comping in with the power supply) should be separate from the signal ground or digital ground (the ground running to all your chips), and both should be separate from the analog ground (the ground for your analog components), if one is present. They should all be connected together, but only at one point. This helps isolate the digital and analog sections from each other’s noise, as well as from the power-supply noise.
• Decoupling capacitors should be as close as possible to each power pin or each integrated circuit.
• Good practice is to set your clearances to be equal to or greater than the minimum track width to which the PCB manufacturer can etch. Anything finer, and you’re asking for trouble.
• Start construction by soldering in the power connector, voltage regulator, and its support components, including “power” LED if you’ve included one in your design.
• Don’t try to be too adventurous at any stage of the building process. If everything suddenly stops working, it’s much easier to find the cause if you’ve only made on change or addition. Take things one step at a time.
• Learning to debug is learning to think carefully and clearly.
• The essence of debugging is establishing what works and what doesn’t work.
• For any one problem, there is a multitude of possible causes. Debugging is therefore about isolating a fault, and this is best done by a “20 questions” approach. Divide and conquer to solve the problem.
• The moral of the story: don’t assume anything, and check everything. If it still doesn’t work, you haven’t done the checking carefully enough.
• The JTAG port allows for real-time debugging of hardware and software. It allows you to single-step or multi-step through code running directly on the target system.
• I have found it good practice to give the processor control of the flash’s reset. As part of the processor’s initialization routines executed in its reset firmware, I get the processor to reset the flash, nudging it into reality. It’s a simple thing, but it makes all the difference for a reliable system.
• I2C uses two wires to connect multiple devices in a multi-drop bus. The bus is bidirectional, low-speed, and synchronous to a common clock. Devices may be attached or detached from the I2C bus without affecting other devices.
• The two wires used to interconnect with I2C are SDA (serial data) and SCL (serial clock). Both lines are open-drain. They are connected to a positive supply via a pull-up resistor and therefore remain high when not in use. A device using the I2C bus to communicate drives the lines low or leaves them pulled high as appropriate.
• You can use I2C to add simple LCDs to your embedded computer. These LCDs are usually just a few lines of text high, but are useful for simple message display functions.
• Serial I/O involves the transfer of data over a single wire for each direction. All serial interfaces convert parallel data to a serial bit stream, and vice versa. Serial communication is employed when it is not practical, either in physical or cost terms, to move data in parallel between systems.
• For embedded computers, a simple serial interface is the easiest and cheapest way to connect to a host computer, either as part of the application or merely for debugging purposes.
• In any transfer of data over a potentially noisy medium (such as a serial cable), the possibility of errors exists. To detect such errors, many serial systems implement parity as a simple check of the validity of the data. The parity bit of a byte to be transmitted is calculate by the sending UART and included with the byte as part of the transmission. The receiving UART also calculates the parity bit for the byte and compares this against the parity bit received. If they match, the receiver assumes that everything is fine. If they do not, the receiver then knows that something went amiss and that an error exists.
• When two remote systems are communicating serially, there needs to be some way to prevent the transmitter from sending new data before the receiver has had a chance to process the old data. This process is known as handshaking, or flow control. The way it works is simple. After transmitting a byte, the transmitter will not send again until it has been given confirmation that the receiver is ready.
• If an embedded system is to be permanently connected to a host computer via an RS-232C serial interface, it is possible to parasitically power the embedded system from the serial interface.
• Unlike RS-232C, which is referenced to local ground, RS-422 uses the difference between two lines, known as a twisted pair or a differential pair, to represent the logic level. THus, RS-422 is a balanced transmission, or, in other words, it is not referenced to local ground. Any noise or interference will affect both wires of the twisted pair, but the difference between them will be less affected. This is known as common mode rejection.
• The basic purpose of IrDA is to provide device-to-device communication over short distances.
• SInce IrDA communicates using light, there must be some way to distinguish between a logic 0 and a logic 1 during transmission. To solve this problem, IrDA uses a bit-encoding scheme known as Return-to-Zero, or RZ.
• Now, most UARTs are not capable of performing transmission in RZ or PPM encoding. Therefore, a special device, known as an EnDec (Encoder Decoder), converts the standard UART output to RZ, and vice versa.
• FOr information an application (and remote control) IR protocols and programming, go to http://www.remotecentral.com.
• Series A [USB] connectors are for upstream connections. In other words, a series A receptacle is found on a host or hub, and a series A plug is at the end of the cable that attaches to the host or hub.
• A series B [USB] receptacle is found on a USB device, and a series B plug is at the end of the cable coming downstream from a host or hub.
• One possible solution to implementing USB in your embedded system is to use a USB-to-SPI bridge.
• CAN is a network for industrial applications, where a conventional network just won’t do. CAN is suited to electrically noisy and harsh conditions and is the network of choice in electrically severe environments.
• Amplifiers are used to interface one analog circuit to another. An amplifier is a circuit that increases (or decreases) a given input voltage to produce an output voltage.
• The waveform of the amplifier’s output signal should be identical to the input signal; only its amplitude will have changed. The amount of increase or decrease in the signal is known as the gain of the amplifier.
• A differential amplifier multiples the difference between two input signals and is used to amplify small signals that may be subject to noise. By amplifying the difference between the signal of interest and a reference, any noise present is reduced (since the noise will affect both the signal and the reference equally).
• The process of converting an analog signal to digital is known as sampling or quantization. ADCs have two principal characteristics: sample rate and resolution.
• The faster the sample rate, the more accurate your sampled results will be.
• Since your sampling is quantizing the signal both in terms of amplitude (ADC resolution) and time (sample rate), a quantization error will always result.
• By placing three accelerometers orthogonally, you get an accurate 3-D motion recorder.
• Pressure sensors work by measuring the deflection of a diaphragm separating two chambers. One chamber is exposed to the pressure that is being measured, while the other chamber holds a reference pressure. The pressure difference between the two chambers causes the diaphragm to deflect, and this deflection is converted into a voltage that is proportional to the pressure difference.
• A low-pass (averaging) filter on the PWM output will convert the pulses to an analog voltage, proportional to the duty cycle of the PWM signal. By varying the duty cycle, we can vary the analog voltage.
• If your hardware and software are responsible for moving a physical object, then a bug can easily cause physical damage too. So be careful.
• Using PWM, you can get very slow mtor speeds and very fine control. The pulses can cause a jerkiness to the motor if the overall frequency is low, but by choosing a high frequency, the jerkiness is averaged out.
• The easiest way to measure a motor rotational speed is to use an optical encoder module. The encoder consists of a light source (LED) and an array of photodetectors, separated from each other by a slotted disc known as a code wheel.
• The PIC excels in applications for which size and power consumption are critical. Being able to drop a tiny computer system in to a design is a great bonus, and it is dial for battery-powered applications, since it can (almost) run off the field of a stray electron.
• For many simple digital applications, a small microprocessor is a better choice than discrete logic, because it is able to execute software. It is therefore able to perform certain tasks with much less hardware complexity.
• The AVR processors (and PICs too) included an internal circuit known as a brownout detector (BOD). This detects minor fluctuations on the processor's power supply that may corrupt its operation, and if such a lucutuation is detected, it generates a rest and restarts the processor.
• Any sort of mechanical switch acts as a little inductor when pressed. The result is a rapid ringing oscillation on the signal line that quickly decays away.
• A memory cycle is defined as the period of time it takes for a processor to initiate an access to memory (or peripheral), perform the transfer, and terminate the access.
• Timing is probably the most critical aspect of computer design.
• In all practical memory-management systems, words of memory are grouped together to form pages, and an address can be considered to consist of a page number and the number of a word within that page. The MMU translates the logical page to a physical page, while the word number is left unchanged. In practice, the overall address is just a concentration of the page number and the word number.
• The MMU contains a translation table, which remaps the input address to different output addresses. To change the translation table, the processor must be able to access the MMU.
• Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) are special-purpose processors designed for executing mathematically intensive algorithms.
• The basic purpose of a DSP is to rapidly read in some data, perform a complex algorithm on it, and then move out the results. Manay DSPs have dual data spaces, known as X and Y. THey are able to access both data spaces simultaneously, retrieving two operands at once for processing.

On Leadership by Harvard Business Review

• I have found, however, that the most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence.
• The EI skills are:
• Self-awareness--knowing one’s strengths, weaknesses, drivers, values, and impact on others.
• Self-regulation--controlling or redirecting disruptive impulses and moods.
• Motivation--relishing achievement for its own sake.
• Empathy--understanding other people’s emotional makeup.
• Social skill--building rapport with others to move them in desired directions.
• Use practice and feedback from others to strengthen specific EI skills.
• Self-awareness means having a deep understanding of one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs, and drives. People with strong self-awareness are neither overly critical nor unrealistically hopeful. Rather, they are honest--with themselves and others.
• People who have a high degree of self-awareness recognize how their feelings affect them, other people, and their job performance.
• Scientific inquiry strongly suggests that there is a genetic component to emotional intelligence.
• One thing is certain: Emotional intelligence increases with age. There is an old-fashioned word for the phenomenon: maturity.
• It’s important to emphasize that building one’s emotional intelligence cannot--will not--happen without sincere desire and concerted effort.
• A person who lacks self-awareness is apt to make decisions that bring on inner turmoil by treading on buried values.
• The decisions of self-aware people mesh with their values; consequently, they often find work to be energizing.
• How can one recognize self-awareness? First and foremost, it shows itself as candor and an ability to assess yourself realistically. People with high self-awareness are able to speak accurately and openly--although not necessarily effusively or confessionally--about their emotions and the impact they have on their work.
• One of the hallmarks of self-warewss is a self-deprecating sense of humor.
• Self-aware people know--and are comfortable talking about--their limitations and strengths, and they often demonstrate a thirst for constructive criticisms. By contrast, people with low self-awareness interpret the message that they need to improve as a threat or a sign of failure.
• Self-aware people can also be recognized by their self-confidence.
• People generally admire and respect candor.
• Why doe self-regulation matter so much for leaders? First of all, people who are in control of their feelings and impulses--that is, people who are reasonable--are able to create an environment of trust and fairness. In such an environment, peopltics and infighting are sharply reduced and productivity is high. Talented people flock to the organization and aren’t tempted to leave. And self-regulation has a trickle-down effect.
• The signs of emotional self-regulation, therefore, are easy to see: a propensity for reflection and thoughtfulness; comfort with ambiguity and change; and integrity--an ability to say no to impulsive urges.
• People who can master their emotions are sometimes seen as cold fish--their considered responses are taken as a lack of passion.
• In my research, extreme displays of negative emotions have never emerged as a driver of good leadership.
• If there is one trait that virtually all effective leaders have, it is motivation. They are driven to achieve beyond expectations--their own and everyone else’s. The key word here is achieve.
• Those with leadership potential are motivated by a deeply embedded desire to achieve for the sake of achievement.
• During performance reviews, people with high levels of motivation might ask to be “stretched” by their superiors.
• When people love their jobs for the work itself, they often feel committed to the organizations that make that work possible. Committed employees are likely to stay with an organizations even when they are pursued by headhunters waving money.
• Empathy is particularly important today as a component of leadership for at least three reasons: the increasing use of teams; the rapid pace of globalization; and the growing need to retain talent.
• A team’s leader must be able to sense and understand the viewpoints of everyone around the table.
• Finally, empathy plays a key role in the retention of talent, particularly in today’s information economy. Leaders have always needed empathy to develop and keep good people, but today the stakes are higher. When good people leave, they take the company’s knowledge with them.
• The first three components of emotional intelligence are self-management skills. The last two, empathy and social skill, concern a person’s ability to manage relationships with others.
• Social skill, rather, is friendliness with a purpose: moving people in the direction you desire, whether that’s agreement on a new marketing strategy or enthusiasm about a new product.
• The leader’s task is to get work done through other people, and social skill makes that possible.
• What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices:
• They asked, “What needs to be done?”
• They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?”
• They develop action plans.
• They took responsibility for decisions.
• They took responsibility for communicating.
• They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.
• They ran productive meetings.
• They thought and said “we” rather than “I”.
• The first two practices gave them the knowledge they needed. The next four helped them convert this knowledge into effective action. The last two ensured the whole organization felt responsible and accountable.
• Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success.
• The answer to the question “What needs to be done?” almost always contains more than one urgent task. But effective executives do not splinter themselves. They concentrate on one task if at all possible.
• So what do effective leaders have in common? THey get the right things done, in the right ways--by following eight simple rules:
• Ask what needs to be done.
• Ask what’s right for the enterprise.
• Develop action plans.
• Take responsibility for decisions.
• Take responsibility for communicating.
• Focus on opportunities, not problems.
• Run productive meetings.
• Think and say “We”, not “I”.
• Once you know what must be done, identify tasks you’re best at, concentrating on one at a time. After completing a task, reset priorities based on new realities.
• Decisions that are right for your enterprise are ultimately right for all stakeholders.
• Devise plans that specify desired results and constraints.
• Ensure that each decision specifies who’s accountable for carrying it out, when it must be implemented, who'll be affected by it, and who must be informed.
• You get results by exploiting opportunities, not solving problems.
• Terminate the meeting once the purpose is accomplished.
• Your authority comes from your organization’s trust in you. To get the best results, always consider your organization’s needs and opportunities before your own.
• Effective executives try to focus on jobs they’ll do especially well. They know that enterprises perform if top management performs--and don’t if it doesn’t.
• Asking “What is right for the enterprise?” does not guarantee that the right decision will be made. Even the most brilliant executive is juman and thus prone to mistakes and prejudices. But failure to ask the question virtually guarantees the wrong decision.
• Executives are doers; they execute. Knowledge is useless to executives until it has been translated into deeds. But before springing into action, the executive needs to plan his course. He needs to think about desired results, probable restraints, future revisions, check-in points, and implications for how he’ll spend his time.
• The action plan is a statement of intentions rather than a commitment. It must not become a straightjacket. It should be revises often, because every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.
• Time is an executive’s scarcest and most precious resource.
• A decision has not been made until people know:
• The name of the person accountable for carrying it out
• The deadline
• The names of the people who will be affected by the decision and therefore have to know about, understand, and approve it--or at least not be strongly opposed to it
• The names of the people who have to be informed of the decisions, even if they are not directly affected by it
• People who have failed in a new job should be given the choice to go back to a job at their former level and salary.
• A systematic decision review can be a powerful tool for self-development, too. Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information. It shows them their biases.
• Allocating the best people to the right positions is a crucial, tough job that many executives slight, in part because they best people are already too busy.
• Decisions are made at every level of the organization, beginning with individual professional contributors and frontline supervisors.
• Making good decisions si a crucial skill at every level. It needs to be taught explicitly to everyone in organizations that are based on knowledge.
• Good executives focus on opportunities rather than problems. Problems have to be taken care of, of course; they must not be swept under the rug. But problem solving, how were necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.
• Effective executives put their best people on opportunities rather than on problems.
• Even a conversation with only one other person is a meeting.
• The key to running an effective meeting is to decide in advance what kind of meeting it will be. Different kinds of meetings require different forms of preparation and different results.
• Making a meeting productive takes a good deal of self-discipline. It requires that executives determine what kind of meeting is appropriate and then stick to that format. It’s also necessary to terminate the meeting as soon as its specific purpose has been accomplished. Good executives don’t raise another matter for discussion. They sum up and adjourn.
• Effective executives know that any given meetings is either productive or a total waste of time.
• Effective executives know that they have ultimate responsibility, which can be neither shared not delegated. But they have authority only because they have the trust of the organization.
• Listen first, speak last.
• Effectiveness is a discipline. And, like every discipline, effectiveness can be learned and must be earned.
• Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious.
• Leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.
• Most U.S. corporations today are over-managed and underled.
• Successful corporations don't’ wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential.
• Once companies understand the fundamental difference between leadership and management, they can begin to groom their top people to provide both.
• Management is about coping with complexity. It’s practices and procedures are largely a response to one of the most significant developments of the twentieth century: the emergence of large organizations. Without good management, complex enterprises tend to become chaotic in ways that threaten their very existence. Good management brings a degree of order and consistency to key dimensions like the quality and profitability of products.
• Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change.
• Major changes are more and more necessary to survive and compete effectively in this new environment. More change always demands more leadership.
• The fact of the matter is that leaderships skills are not innate. They can be acquired, and honed.
• Management is about coping with complexity; it brings order and predictability to a situation.
• Leadership, then, is about learning how to cope with rapid change.
• Management involves planning and budgeting. Leadership involves setting direction.
• Management involves organizing and staffing. Leadership involves aligning people.
• Management provides control and solves problems. Leadership provides motivation.
• No one yet has figured out how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led.
• The aim of management is predictability--orderly results. Leadership’s function is to produce change. Setting the direction of that change, therefore, is essential work.
• Sine the function of leadership is to produce change, setting the direction of that change is fundamental to leadership.
• What’s urcial about a vision is not its originality but how well it serves the interests of important constituencies--customers, stockholders, employees--and how easily it can be translated into a realistic competitive strategy.
• When a company that has never been better than a weak competitor in an industry suddenly starts talking about becoming number one, that is a pipe dream, not a vision.
• One of the most frequent mistakes that overmanaged and underled corporations make is to embrace long-term panning as a panacea for their lack of direction and inability to adapt to an increasingly competitive and dynamic business environment.
• Planning works best not as a substitute for direction setting but as a complement to it.
• Trying to get people to comprehend a vision of an alternative future is also a communications challenge of a completely different magnitude from organizing them to fulfill a short-term plan.
• Another big challenge in leadership efforts is credibility--getting people to believe the message.
• One of the reasons some organizations have difficulty adjusting to rapid changes in markets or technology is that so many people in those companies feel relatively powerless.
• Since change is the function of leadership, being able to generate highly energetic behavior is important for coping with the inevitable barriers to change.
• Achieving grand visions always requires a burst of energy.
• Leaders almost always have had opportunities during their twenties and thirties to actually try to lead, to take a risk, and to learn from both triumphs and failures. Such learning seems essential in developing a wide range of leadership skills and perspectives.
• People who provide effective leadership in important jobs always have a chance, before they get into those jobs, to grow beyond the narrow base that characterizes most managerial careers. This is usually the result of lateral career moves of of early promotes to unusually broad job assignments.
• Corporations that do a better-than-average job of developing leaders put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities for relatively young employees.
• Institutionalizing a leadership-centered culture is the ultimate act of leadership.
• Adaptive work is required when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge.
• Adaptive problems are often systemic problems with no ready answers.
• Rather than protecting people from outside threats, leaders should allow them to feel the pinch of reality in order to stimulate them to adapt.
• Adaptive work is tough on everyone. For leaders, it’s counterintuitive. Rather than providing solutions, you must ask tough questions and leverage employees collective intelligence.
• For your employees, adaptive work is painful--requiring unfamiliar flores, responsibilities, values, and ways of working.
• Instead of maintaining norms, leaders have to challenge “the way we do business” and help others distinguish immutable values from historical practices that must go.
• Drawing on our experience with managers from around the world, we offer six principles for leading adaptive work: “getting on the balcony”, identifying the adaptive challenge, regulating distress, maintaining disciplined attention, giving the work back to people, and protecting voices of leadership from below.
• Control the rate of change: Don’t start too many initiatives simultaneously without stopping others.
• Encourage risk taking and responsibility---then back people up if they err.
• When businesses cannot learn quickly to adapt to new challenges, they are likely to face their own form of extinction.
• No executive can hide from the fact that his or her team reflects the best and the worst of the company’s values and norms, and therefore provides a case in point for insight into the nature of the adaptive work ahead.
• Adaptive work generates distress. Before putting people to work on challenges for which there are no ready solutions, a leader must realize that people can learn only so much so fast.
• A leader must sequence and pace the work. Too often, senior managers convey that everything is important. They start new initiatives without stopping other activities, or they start too many initiatives at the same time. They overwhelm and disorient the very people who need to take responsibility for the work.
• A leader provides direction by identifying the organization’s adaptive challenge and framing the key questions and issues. A leader protects people by managing the rate of change. A leader orients people to new roles and responsibilities by clarifying business realities and key values. A leader helps expose conflict, viewing it as the engine of creativity and learning.
• A leader has to have the emotional capacity to tolerate uncertainty, frustration, and pain.
• No one learns anything without being open to contrasting points of view.
• The work of the leader is to get conflict out into the open and use it as a source of creativity.
• Because work avoidance is rampant in organizations, a leader has to counteract distractions that prevent people from dealing with adaptive issues.
• Distractions have to be identified when they occur so that people will regain focus.
• People need leadership to help them maintain their focus on the tough questions. Disciplined attention is the currency of leadership.
• Everyone in the organization has special access to information that comes from his or her particular vantage point.
• When people do not act on their special knowledge, businesses fail to adapt.
• All too often, people look up the chain of command, expecting senior management to meet market challenges for which they themselves are responsible.
• Letting people take the initiative in defining and solving problems means that management needs to learn to support rather than control.
• A leader has to let people bear the weight of responsibility.
• Leadership has to take place every day. It cannot be the responsibility of the few, a rare event, or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
• If you want to silence a room of executives, try this small trick Ask them, “Why would anyone want to be led by you?”
• But we’ve discovered that inspirational leaders also share four unexpected qualities:
• They selectively show their weaknesses.
• They rely heavily on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of their actions.
• They manage employees with something we call tough empathy.
• They reveal their differences.
• Show you’re human, selectively revealing weaknesses.
• Be a “sensor”, collecting soft people data that lets you rely on intuition.
• Manage employees with “tough empathy”.
• Dare to be different, capitalizing on your uniqueness.
• Exposing a weakness establishes trust and thus helps get folks on board.
• Sharing an imperfection is so effective because it underscores a human being’s authenticity.
• Don’t expose a weakness that others see as fatal. Choose a tangential weakness instead.
• Capitalizing on what’s unique about yourself lets you signal your separateness as a leader, and motivates others to perform better.
• Knowing which weakness to disclose is a highly honed art. The golden rule is never to expose a weakness that will be seen as a fatal flaw--by which we mean a flaw that jeopardizes central aspects of your professional role.
• By definition, sensins a situation involves projection--that state of mind when you attribute your own ideas to other people and things. When a person “projects”, his thoughts may interfere with the truth.
• Tough empathy means giving people what they need, not what they want.
• At its best, taught empathy balances respect for the individual and for the task at hand.
• People do not commit to executives who merely lie up to the obligations of their jobs.
• Another quality of inspirational leaders is that they capitalize on what’s unique about themselves.
• The most effective leaders deliberately use differences to keep a social distance. Even as they are drawing their followers close to them, inspirational leaders signal their separateness.
• Inspirational leaders use separateness to motivate others to perform better. It is not that they are being Machiavellian but that they recognize instinctively that followers will push themselves if their leader is just a little aloof. Leadership, after all, is not a popularity contest.
• No one can just ape another leaders. So the challenge facing prospective leaders is for them to be themselves, but with more skill. That can be done by making yourself increasingly aware of the four leadership qualities we describe and by manipulating these qualities to come up with a personal style that works for you. Remember, there is no universal formula, and what’s needed will vary from context to context.
• Extraordinary leaders find meaning in--and learn from--the most negative events.
• Crucibles are intense, often traumatic--and always unplanned.
• Four skills enable leaders to learn from adversity:
• Engage others in shared meaning.
• A distinctive, compelling voice.
• Integrity.
• Adaptive capacity.
• A crucible is, by definition, a transformative experience through which an individual comes to a new or an altered sense of identity.
• We believe that great leaders possess four essential skills, and, we were surprised to learn, these happen to be the same skills that allow a person to find meaning in what could be a debilitating experience. First is the ability to engage others in shared meaning. Second is a distinctive and compelling voice. Third is a sense of integrity (including a strong set of values). But by far the most critical skill of the four is what we call “adaptive capacity”.
• This [adaptive capacity]  is, in essence, applied creativity--an almost magical ability to transcend adversity, with all its attendant stresses, and to emerge stronger than before. It’s composed of two primary qualities: the ability to grasp context, and hardiness. The ability to grasp context implies an ability to weight a welter of factors, ranging from how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture to being able to put a situation in perspective. Without this, leaders are utterly lost, because they cannot connect with their constituents.
• Hardiness is just what it sounds like--the perseverance and toughness that enable people to emerge from devastating circumstances without losing hope.
• It is the combination of hardiness and ability to grasp context that, above all, allows a person to not only survive an ordeal, but to learn from it, and to emerge stronger, more engage, and more committed than ever.
• “Level 5” reference to the highest level in a hierarchy of executive capabilities that we identified during our research. Leaders at the other four levels in the hierarchy can produce high degrees of success but not enough to elevate companies from mediocrity to sustained excellence.
• The Level 5 hierarchy:
• Level 5--Executive: Builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical combination of personal humility plus professional will.
• Level 4--Effective Leader: Catalyzes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision; stimulates the group to high performance standards.
• Level 3--Competent Manager: Organizes people and resources toward the effective and efficient pursuit of predetermined objectives.
• Level 2--Contributing Team Member: Contributes to the achievement of group objectives; works effectively with others in a group setting.
• Level 1--Highly Capable Individual: Makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good work habits.
• Level 5 leaders blend the paradoxical combination of deep personal humility with intense professional will.
• Good-to-great transformations don’t happen without Level 5 leaders at the helm. They just don’t.
• Humility + Will = Level 5
• Attend to people first, strategy second. Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off--then figure out where to drive it.
• Deal with the brutal facts of your current reality--while maintaining absolute faith that you’ll prevail.
• Keep pushing your organizational “flywheel”. With consistent effort, momentum increases until--bang!--the wheel hits the breakthrough point.
• Think of your company as three intersecting circles: what it can be best at, how its economics work best, and what ignites its people’s passions. Eliminate everything else.
• Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, shy and fearless.
• The fox knows a little about many things, but the hedgehog knows only one big thing very well. The fox is complex; the hedgehog simple. And the hedgehog wins. Our research shows that breakthroughs require simple, hedgehog-like understanding of three intersecting circles: what a company can be the best in the world at, how its economics work best, and what best ignites the passions of its people. Breakthroughs happen when you get the hedgehog concept and become systematic and consistent with it, eliminating virtually anything that does not fit in the three circles.
• Besides extreme humility, Level 5 leaders also display tremendous professional will.
• Because Level 5 leaders have ambition not for themselves but for their companies, they routinely select superb successors.
• The great irony is that the animus and personal ambition that often drives people to become a Level 4 leaders stands at odds with the humility required to rise to Level 5.
• Most developmental psychologists agree that what differentiates leaders is not su much their philosophy of leadership, their personality, or thier style of management. Rather, it’s their internal “action logic”--how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged.
• Recognize that great leaders are differentiated not by their personality or philosophy but by their action logic--how they interpret their own and others’ behavior and how they maintain power or protect against threats.
• The least effective [type of leader] for organizational leadership are the Opportunists and Diplomat; the most effective, the strategist and Alchemist.
• The largest category of leader is that of Experts, who account for 38% of all professional in our sample. In contrast to Opportunists, who vosuns on trying to control the world around them, and Diplomats, who concentrate on controlling their own behavior, Experts try to exercise control by perfecting their knowledge, both in their professional and personal lives. Exercising watertight thinking is extremely important to Experts.
• Experts are great individual contributors because of their pursuit of continuous improvement, efficiency, and perfection. But as managers, they can be problematic because they are so completely sure they are right.
• Achievers often find themselves clashing with Experts. The Expert subordinate, in particular, finds the Achiever leader hard to take because he cannot deny the reality of the Achiever’s success even though he feels superior.
• What sets Individualists apart from Achievers is their awareness of a possible conflict between their principles and their actions, or between the organization’s values and its implementation of those values. This conflict becomes the source of tension, creativity, and a growing desire for further development.
• Individualists also tend to ignore rules they regard as irrelevant, which often makes them a source of irritation to both colleagues and bosses.
• Strategists account for just 4% of leaders. What sets them apart from Individualists is their focus on organizational constraints and perceptions, which they treat as discussable and transformable.
• The most remarkable--and encouraging--finding from our research is that leaders can transform from one action logic to another.
• In both business and personal relationships, speaking and listening must come to be experienced not as necessary, taken-for-granted ways of communicating predetermined ideas but as intrinsically forward-thinking, creative actions.
• Over the long term, the most effective teams are those with a Strategists culture, in which the group sees business challenges as opportunities for growth and learning on the part of both individuals and the organization.
• Those who are willing to work at developing themselves and becoming more self-aware can almost certainly evolve over time into truly transformational leaders.
• No one can be authentic by trying to imitate someone else. You can learn from other’s experiences, but there is no way you can be successful when you are trying to be like them. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not a replica of someone else.
• Authentic leaders demonstrate a passion for their purpose, practice their values consistently, and lead with their hearts as well as their heads. They establish long-term, meaningful relationships and have the self-discipline to get results. They know who they are.
• All of us have the spark of leadership in us, whether it is in business, in government, or as a nonprofit volunteer. The challenge is to understand ourselves well enough to discover where we can use our leadership gifts to serve others.
• Discovering your authentic leadership requires a commitment to developing yourself.
• Authentic leaders act on that awareness by practicing their values and principles, sometimes at substantial risk to themselves. They are careful to balance their motivations so that they are driven by these inner values as much as by a desire for external rewards or recognition. Authentic leaders also keep a strong support team around them, ensuring that they live integrated, grounded lives.
• Denial can be the greatest hurdle that leaders face in becoming self-aware.
• Authentic leaders realize that they have to be willing to listen to feedback--especially the kind they don’t want to hear.
• Leadership principles are values translated into action. Having a solid base of values and testing them under fire enables you to develop the principles you will use in leading.
• Because authentic leaders need to sustain high levels of motivation and keep their lives in balance, it is critically important for them to understand what drives them. There are two types of motivations--extrinsic and intrinsic. Although they are reluctant to admit it, any leaders are proplledded to achieve by measuring their success against the outside world’s parameters. They enjoy the recognition and status that come with promotions and financial rewards. Intrinsic motivations, on the other hand, are derived from their sense of the meaning of their life. They are closely linked to one’s life story and the wya one frames it.
• The only way to avoid getting caught up in materialism is to understand where you find happiness and fulfillment.
• Intrinsic motivations are congruent with your values and are more fulfilling than extrinsic motivations.
• Leaders cannot succeed on their own; even the most outwardly confident executives need support and advice. Without strong relationships to provide perspective, it is very easy to lose your way.
• Integrating their lives is one of the greatest challenges leaders can face. To lead a balanced life, you need to bring together all of its constituent elements--work, family, community, and friends--so that you can be the same person in each environment.
• The world can shape you if you let it. To have a sense of yourself as you live, you must make conscious choices. Sometimes the choices are really hard, and you make a lot of mistakes.
• Authentic leaders have a steady and confident presence. They do not show up as one person on eday and another person the next. Integration takes discipline, particularly during stressful times when it is easy to become reactive and slip back into bad habits.
• Leading is high-stress work. There is no way to avoid stress when you are responsible for people, organizations, outcomes, and managing the constant uncertainties of the environment. The higher you go, the greater your freedom to control your destiny but also the higher the degree of stress. The question is not whether you can avoid stress but how you can control it to maintain your own sense of equilibrium.
• Authentic leaders recognize that leadership is not about their successes or about getting loyal subordinates to follow them. They know the key to a successful organization is having empower leaders at all levels, including those who have no direct reports. They not only inspire those around them, they empower those individuals to step up and lead.
• All leaders have to deliver bottom-line results.
• It may be possible to drive short-term outcomes without being authentic, but authentic leadership is the only way we know to create sustainable long-term results.
• It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader: the flawless person at the trop who’s got it all figured out. In fact, the sooner leaders stop trying to be all things to all people, the better off their organizations will be.
• Only when leaders come to see themselves as incomplete--as having both strengths and weaknesses--will they be able to make up for their missing skills by relying on others.
• Accept that you’re human, with strengths and weaknesses.
• Then find and work with others who can provide the capabilities you’re missing.
• Leaders need to have the courage to present a map that highlights features they believe to be critical, even if their map doesn’t conform to the dominant perspective.
• Good leaders distinguish their observations from their opinions and judgements and explain their reasoning without aggression or defensiveness.
• Visioning involves creating compelling images of the future.
• Fundamentally, visioning gives people a sense of meaning in their work. Leaders who are skilled in this capability are able to get people excited about their view of the future while inviting others to help crystalize that image.
• Leaders who excel in visioning walk the walk; they work to embody the core values and ideas contained in the vision.
• Even the most compelling vision will lose its power if it floats, unconnected, above the everyday reality of organizational ife. To transform a vision of the future into a present-day reality, leaders need to devisse processes that will give it life. This inventing is what moves a business from the abstract world of ideas to the concrete world of implementation.
• Don’t assume that the way things have always been done is the best way to do them.
• In sum, leaders must be able to succeed at inventing, and this requires both attention to detail and creativity.
• It’s the leader’s responsibility to create an environment that lets people complement one another’s strengths and offset one another’s weaknesses. In this way, leadership is distributed across multiple people throughout the organization.
• Even the most talented leaders require the input and leadership of others, constructively solicited and creatively applied.

The Trivium by Sister Miriam Joseph

• The trivium includes those aspects of the liberal arts that pertain to mind, and the quadrivium, those aspects of the liberal arts that pertain to matter. Logic, grammar, and rhetoric constitute the trivium; and arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy constitute the quadrivium.
• Logic is the art of thinking; grammar, the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought; and rhetoric, the art of communicating through from one mind to another, the adaption of language to circumstance.
• Each of the liberal arts is both a science and an art in the sense that in the province of each there is something to know (science) and something to do (art).
• An art may be used successfully before one has a formal knowledge of its precepts.
• Communication takes place only when two minds really meet. If the reader or listener receives the same ideas and emotions that the writer or speaker wished to convey, he understands (although he may disagree); if he receives no ideas, he does not understand; if different ideas, he misunderstands.
• The three R’s--reading, writing, and reckoning--constitute the core not only of the elementary education but also of higher education. Competence in the use of language and competence in handling abstractions, particularly mathematical quantities, are regarded as the most reliable indexes to a student’s intellectual caliber.
• Rhetoric is the master art of the trivium, for it presupposes and makes use of grammar and logic; it is the art of communicating through symbols ideas about reality.
• Understanding is the intuitive grasp of first principles. Science is knowledge of proximate causes. Wisdom is knowledge of ultimate causes--metaphysics in the natural order, theology in the supernatural order. Prudence is right reasoning about something to be done. Art is right reasoning about something to be made.
• The function of language is threefold: to communicate thought, volition, and emotion.
• There are possible only two modes of communicating ideas through a physical or material medium--by imitation or by symbol.
• An imitation is an artificial likeness, for example: a painting, photograph, cartoon, statue, pantomime, a gesture such as threatening with a clenched fist or rejecting by pushing away with the hands, and picture writing. There is no mistaking the meaning of a picture; it means what it resembles. [...] Within limits, however, imitation is a vivid and effective mode of communication.
• A symbol is an arbitrary sensible sign having a meaning imposed on it by convention. A sign is sensible, for it can be perceived by the senses. Every sign has meaning either from nature or from convention.
• All words are symbols with the exception of a very few imitative or onomatopoeic words, such as boom, buzz, hiss, plop, tickstock.
• Special symbols are designed by experts to express with precision ideas in a special field of knowledge, for example: mathematics, chemistry, music. Such special languages are international and do not require translation, for their symbols are understood by people of all nationalities in their own language.
• It is the nature of language to communicate through symbols. Language is a system of symbols for expressing our thoughts, volitions, and emotions.
• The human power to abstract and to study a selected aspect of reality is the measure of intellectual progress which contrast strikingly with the utter absence of such progress among irrational animals. Despite their wonderful instincts, which are often superior to the instincts of man. As human civilization advances, the proportion of abstract substantives in the language increases.
• The fundamental function of grammar is to establish laws for relating symbols so as to express thought. A sentence expresses a thought, a relation of ideas, in a declaration, a question, a command, a wish, a prayer, or an exclamation. Categorematic symbols are what are related; syncategorematic symbols are the meals for relating them; the relation itself is the sentence.
• Marks of punctuation do for written language what phrasing, stress, and some forms of intonation, such as raising the voice for a question, do for spoken language.
• That oral punctuation does for reading what punctuation marks do for writing becomes evident if one tries to read pages unpunctuated.
• Communication is dynamic; it is the conveying of an idea from one mind to another through a material medium, words or other symbols. If the listener or reader receives through language precisely the ideas put into it by the speaker or writer, these two have “come to terms”--the idea has passed successfully, clearly, from the giver to the receiver, from one end or term of the line of communication to the other.
• Education is the formal process of making explicit all that is implicit in a given proposition. Hence it is not an advance in knowledge. In this it differs radically from deduction, of which the syllogism is the form, for through the syllogism the mind advances to new knowledge. Through education we turn a proposition, as it were, inside out and upside down until we have explored all its content.
• The present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, for that is the only thing which he has, and a man cannot lose a thing that he has not--Marcus Aurelius
• A fallacy is a violation of logical principle disguised under an appearance of validity; it is an error in process. Falsity is an error in fact. Fallacy arises from an erroneous relation of propositions; falsity, from an erroneous relation of terms. A premise may be false; reasoning may be fallacious.
• To discover a fallacy is to discover the reason why the mind was deceived into regarding error as truth. To classify fallacies is to attempt to find common ground for such deception. But a given argument may be fallacious for more reasons than one, and hence it may exemplify more than one fallacy. Consequently, a classification of fallacies is neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive.
• The requirements of truth are:
• What is thought must represent what is. (This is the norm of conception and of induction.)
• Thoughts must be consistent among themselves. (This is the norm of deduction.)
• Scientific induction as a method of discovering truth embraces five steps: observation, analogy, hypothesis, analysis and sifting of data, and verification of the hypothesis.
• Logic and rhetoric are concerned with the discovery and communication of truth directly from the mind of the author to the mind of the listener or reader. Poetic is a very different mode of communication, an indirect one that imitates life in characters and situations; readers or listeners share imaginatively the characters’ experiences as if they were their own; yet poetic rises out of knowledge as well as feeling ,and logic and rhetoric are employed in the communication of the whole, which goes beyond them. Poetic is argument through vivid representation.
• Persuasion is achieved by means of logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos requires one to convince the minds of the listeners or readers by proving the truth of what one is saying. Pathos requires one to pu the listeners or readers into a frame of mind favorable to one’s purpose, principally by working on the emotions. Ethos requires one to inspire in the audience, by courtesy and other qualities, confidence in one’s character, competence, good sense, good moral character, and good will.
• Poetry communicates experience that cannot be expressed in any other way. The poet sees and feels with a depth and intensity beyond that of the ordinary person; the poet communicates not thought only but this experience. To read poetry is to share the experience of the poet.
• Condense your sentences. Pack much meaning into few words. Use words that are fresh, accurate, vivid, specific.
• Verbs, above all, are the key to a rigorous style.
• To give your writing life and movement, use vivid verbs in the active voice. Put the verb idea into the verb rather than into an abstract noun with an empty verb like occur.
• Cut out deadwood--needless words that dilute your thought and make your style insipid, dull, wordy. Prefer the specific expression to the general, the positive to the negative, the definite to the indefinite.

How to Solve It by George Polya

• The first step to solving a problem is: understand the problem. After the problem-solver has completed this phase of the problem, he goes on to the next step, which is: devise a plan. After these two steps are accomplished, the next step becomes relatively easy, which is: carry out the plan.
• One of the most important tasks of the teacher is to help his students. This task is not quite easy; it demands time, practice, devotion, and sound principles.
• The student should acquire as much experience of independent work as possible. BUt if he is left alone with his problem without any help or with insufficient help, he may make no progress at all.
• Solving problems is a practical skill like, let us say, swimming. We acquire any practical skill by imitation and practice. [...] Trying to solve problems, you have to observe and to imitate what other people do when solving problems and, finally, you learn to do problems by doing them.
• Understand the problem. It is foolish to answer a question that you do not understand. It is sad to work for an end that you do not desire.
• If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem.
• Consider your problem from various sides and seek contacts with your formerly acquired knowledge.
• Analogy is a sort of similarity. Similar objects agree with each other in some respect, analogous objects agree in certain relations of their respective parts.
• In solving a proposed problem, we can often use the solution of a simpler analogous problem; we may be able to use its method, or its result, or both.
• An auxiliary theorem is a theorem whose proof we undertake in the hope of promoting the solution of our original problem.
• An auxiliary problem is a problem which we consider, not for its own sake, but because we hope that it's condensation may help us to solve another problem, our original problem. The original problem is the end we wish to attain, the auxiliary problem a means by which we try to attain our end.
• Human superiority consists in going around an obstacle that cannot be overcome directly, in devising a suitable auxiliary problem when the original problem appears insoluble. To devise an auxiliary problem is an important operation of the mind.
• The mathematical experience of the student is incomplete if he never had an opportunity to solve a problem invented by himself.
• In scientific cowork, it is necessary to apportion wisely determination to outlook. You do not take up a problem, unless it has some interest; you settle down to work seriously if the problem seems instructive; you throw in your whole personality if there is a great promise. If your purpose is set, you stick to it, but you do not make it unnecessarily difficult for yourself. You do not despise little successes, on the contrary, you seek them: If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem.
• Incomplete understanding of the problem, owing to lack of concentration, is perhaps the most widespread deficiency in solving problems. With respect to devising a plan and maintaining a general idea of the solution two opposite faults are frequent. Some students rush into calculations and constructions without any plan or general idea; others wait clumsily for some idea to come and cannot do anything that would accelerate its coming.
• Assume what is required to be done as already done.
• Generalization may be useful in the solution of problems.
• If you cannot solve the proposed problem do not let this failure afflict you too much but try to find consolation with some easier success, try to solve first some related problem; then you may find courage to attack your original problem again.
• Do not forget that human superiority consists in going around an obstacle that cannot be overcome directly, in devising some suitable auxiliary problem when the original one appears insoluble.
• Induction is the process of discovering general laws by the observation and combination of particular instances.
• Inventor’s paradox: The more ambitious plan may have more chances of success. This sounds paradoxical. Yet, when passing from one problem to another, we may often observe that the new more ambitious problem is easier to handle than the original problem.
• The more comprehensive theorem may be easier to prove, the more general problem may be easier to solve.
• Speaking and thinking are closely connected, the use of words assists the mind. Certain philosophers and philologists went a little further and asserted that the use of words is indispensable to the use of reason.
• Reductio ad absurdum shows the falsity of an assumption by deriving from it a manifest absurdity.
• Indirect proof establishes the truth of an assertion by showing the falsity of the opposite assumption.
• Both “reductio ad absurdum” and indirect proof are effective tools of discovery which present themselves naturally to an intent mind.
• The intelligent problem-solver tries first of all to understand the problem as fully and as clearly as he can. Yet understanding alone is not enough; he must concentrate upon the problem, he must desire earnestly to obtain its solution. If he cannot summon up real desire for solving the problem he would do better to leave it alone. The open secret of real success is to throw your whole personality into your problem.
• How to solve it:
• First: You have to understand the problem.
• Second: Find the connection between the data and the known. You may be obliged to consider auxiliary problems if an immediate connection cannot be found. You should obtain eventually a plan of the solution.
• Third: Carry out the plan.
• Fourth: Examine the solution obtained.

The Einstein Factor by Win Wenger & Richard Poe

• IQ is only one measure of intelligence and not necessarily the best.
• Our subconscious minds spew forth streams of images, hunches, and subtle perceptions almost 24 hours a day, many of them charged with insight and premonition.
• EInstein attributed his scientific prowess to what he called a “vague play”, with “signs”, “images” and other elements, both “visual” and “muscular”. “This combinatory play”, Einstein thought, “seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.”
• Einstein ascribed his ingenious insight to a “combinatory play” of sense impressions, “muscular” feelings, emotion, and intuition. Only in the final stages of thought did Einstein translate his theories into words and equations.
• In fact, all of us possess hidden talents, often in the very areas where we think ourselves least capable.Study, practice, and hard work can bring about incremental improvement. But if we wish to unleash the full power of our genius, we must find that crucial catalyst, that simple trick or knack that will bring our bodies, senses, and minds into critical focus. I call that catalyst the Einstein factor.
• Conventional education and job training are notoriously effective at crushing our confidence and squelching our most brilliant thoughts. Most of learn early to suppress our natural geneious.
• We have far more ability than we commonly realize to engineer our consciousness. The phenomenon of dream recall offers one of the clearest illustrations of this ability.
• Every time you write down your dreams, you reinforce the behavior of dream recall. Your recollection thus becomes stronger. Likewise, every time you fail to write down a dream, you reinforce the behavior or forgetting your dreams, and your recall correspondingly weakens.
• The procedure of Image Streaming is deceptively simple. You sit back in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and describe aloud the flow of mental images through your mind. Three factors are absolutely crucial. I call them the Three Commandments of Image Streaming:
• You must describe the images aloud, either to another person or to a tape recorder. Describing them silently will defeat the purpose of the exercise.
• You must use all five sense in your descriptions. If you see a snow-covered mountain, for example, don’t just describe how it looks. Describe its taste, its texture, its smell, and the sound of wind howling across its peak.
• Phrase all your descriptions in the present tense.
• Memories are stored not in the cells themselves but in the overall pattern of electrical signals firing between cells.
• Key portions of our brain don’t distinguish between dream and reality. When we see, touch, taste, smell, or hear things in a dream, the corresponding sensory portions of our brain light up, exactly as if we had sneezed those things in real life. Physical movement in dreams likewise activates the corresponding motor mechanisms that would drive such movement in waking life.
• Everyone has an Image Stream. You simply need to learn how to stop squelching yours.
• Evidence is growing that this commingling of the senses--called synesthesia--may be a normal function of the mind that is simply suppressed in most people. Image Streaming seems to draw much of its Pole-Bridging power from this hidden mechanism, playing upon links between sense that most of us think of a sqlite distinct and separate.
• Your brain is wired in such a way that vision will always tend to dominate the creative process. That’s all right. But when we describe mental images into a tape recorder, we should take care to include in our descriptions other senses as well especially taste, scent, and touch (texture), which are most often neglected.
• Multisensory description builds up the neural connections between your sense and widens your neurological contact with the Image Stream. The effects of such exercise will be seen quickly in stronger, clearer, more solid-looking mental images.
• The strength and vividness of mental imagery are potentially limitless. Sights, sounds, and sensations, if imagined to their full potential, can solidify so strongly as to be indistinguishable from real perceptions.
• The more absorbed you become in describing an image, the more intently your mind focuses on it and the clearer, sharper, and more solid it becomes.
• In general, the more you describe something, the more of it you get. Your descriptive monologue forms part of a feedback loop. It both follows your Image Stream, and helps create it.
• When you describe any object, real or imaginary, at the same time you are observing it, the very act of description focuses your attention in such a way that you perceive more and more detail about the object being described.
• Vision is the strongest of all the senses, and you will tend to rely on it disproportionately. Practice describing your Image Stream using your non visual senses exclusively. Touch is probably the most important non visual sense.
• There are no hard and fast rules. Indeed, a cardinal principle of Image Streaming is that it doesn’t matter how you get the image started. Once the stream starts flowing, it takes you where it will. It transports you swiftly to the precise psychological space in which you most need to be.
• It can hardly be an accident that researchers in the field of high intelligence have long regarded the habit of compulsive scribbling as one of the tell tale hallmarks of genius.
• A sizeable portion of our brains’ physical development depends not on genetic inheritance, or even on outside stimulus, but rather on the feedback from our own spontaneous and expressive activity.
• By harnessing the power of self-expression and sensory feedback, we can actually change the physical form of our brains.
• Whenever you write down a perception or an idea, you reinforce the behavior of being perceptive or creative. Whenever you fail to describe or recorder such insights, you reinforce the behavior of being unperceptive and uncreative.
• Unfortunately, feedback loops do not always promote brain development. Bad feedback will stunt the brain as powerfully as god feedback helps it. Ingenious expression is all too often punished in our society with mockery, envy, and adult disapproval.
• It is no accident that the greatest geniuses share a profound reverence toward conventional opinion. THe courage to be different is a cornerstone of high intellect.
• Most of our problems are only exacerbated by the things we know. ONly when we shift our attention away from what we know to what we are actually perceiving are most problems resolved.
• By and large, people see and hear exactly what they expect to see and hear, even if it differs from their actual perception. Psychologists call this “set thinking”, because the mind perceives what it is set to perceive.
• To be an Original Observer is not far from being a genius. If we encouraged children to ask questions and seek answers freely, their natural genius would astonish us. Indeed, all children are Original Observers up to the age of four, when they start learning to set their minds at a lower level of curiosity.
• Obviously, it is impossible--and even physically dangerous--for a child to learn everything by trial and error. Our ability to learn from others’ experience is one of the things that makes us human.
• Generally, the best ideas come at the end of brainstorming sessions, after participants have loosened up and allowed their subtler perceptions to come into play.
• The more complexity we bring into our thought process, the more room we create for dramatic state changes. Complexity actually widens our “Surprise!” Space.
• A sense of confusion is the surest sign that your Squelcher has been effectively squelched. When your internal Editor is up and running, you don’t feel confused at all. On the contrary, everything seems very clear and simple. Only when an ingenious thought is bubbling in the pot do you feel as agitated and perplexed.
• Associations are simply those secondary thoughts that the images bring to mind. Think back over your Image Stream. Each image will evoke some clear association as you think about it. Write down that association as it comes to mind, even if it seems silly.
• No rules are so sacred that they should not be broken from time to time.
• Truly ingenious thought occurs in a realm wholly unlike that which our conscious minds can grasp. Great geniuses routinely disengage from rules of ordinary perception that most of us think unbreakable, playing havoc with commonplace notionas of time, space, and form.
• The power of Hidden Questions lies in its efficiency. In other Image Streaming methods, much of our time and effort is spent trying to squelch or right the inner Editor. Hidden Question bypasses the Editor entirely by presenting questions directly to the right brain, giving the left brain no chance whatever to contaminate the data.
• Contrary to popular myth, great geniuses are not necessarily great mnemonists or memorizers. They do, however, know how to find out what they want, when they want it. It call this a metaskill--a fundamental skill from which other skills derive.
• Strong evidence suggests that all of us possess, photographic memory so some degree. Only a few people, however, seem gifted with the ability to retrieve and examine their mental “photographs” at will.
• Success in today’s turbulent new economy is won not by those who have learned a particular skill but by those who can learn new skills quickly.
• The roster of traditional metaskills includes such abilities as reading, writing, speaking, reasoning, and calculating. Your ability to learn more specialized skills-such as using a computer--depends in large measure on how well you have grasped these fundamentals. Yet even these metaskills grow from a deeper and more powerful antecedent--your ability to retain and retrieve data from your memory.
• Information perceived subconsciously impacts the brain for more powerfully than conscious information.
• Most of us never plan our reading. We pick up books and magazines at random and simply start reading. This behavior is terribly inefficient. Reading a book can take days, a long article more than an hour. Such time-consuming tasks should be managed as carefully as any other important job you do.
• THroughout history, great minds have used the power of association to jog their memories. This means linking the information you want to remember with some imagined object, color, or sing-song rhyme. Freenoting will automatically increase your memory of the lecture by associating key points with your own depressive thoughts. The crazier, funnier, and more bizarre those thoughts are, the more memorable they will be.
• This principle [the Principle of Articulation] holds that the more you express or articulate a given perception, the more you will perceive and understand of that ahd related perceptions. The principle of Articulation provides the underlying rationale of both Socratic Method and its corollary, Freenoting.
• The sheer act of persistently expressing our thoughts on some subject causes us to learn more about that subject, even when no new information has been provided from without.
• What enhances our knowledge, in such cases, is not the addition of outside facts, but rather our own perceptions about our perceptions, feeding back into our minds in an ever-growing snowball effect. I cannot emphasize too greatly the awesome--and all-too-often neglected--power of the Principle of Articulation to enhance performance in virtually every field of human endeavor.
• In general, what is expressed by the learner is a hundred times more productive learning than what is expressed to the learner--a statement to which Socrates himself would have heartily assented.
• Our brains, in which reside all that we think of as the human spirit, are totally dependent upon oxygen. Fully one-third of all the oxygen used in our bodies goes directly to the brain. Evidence suggests that the more oxygen we receive, the better our brains function.
• Your breath is, in affect, a pacemaker for your attention. If you take short breaths, you will tend to have short bursts of attention and to speak in short sentences. Deep, full breaths will enable you to speak in longer, more complex sentences and to form deeper thoughts.
• We humans are, at root, social creatures. Our brains seem to function best when they are working with other brains toward some common purpose.
• You are, in fact, never too old to increase your intellect. Still, there is little doubt that very young children are more susceptible than others to brain enhancement techniques.
• The critical years between conception and age five therefore present an invaluable window of opportunities during which we can “jump-start” the brains of our children, giving them an unparalleled early advantage.
• The secret of the Montessori Method is the Feedback Principle. Montessori children receive constant feedback from their acts of spontaneous self-expression.
• Playing and listening to music are not only powerful Pole-Bridging techniques in their own right, but in experiments have been shown to stimulate the brains image-generating faculties.
• Flow increases mental intensity by raising the signal-to-noise ratio in our minds.
• The difference between success and failure often lies in daily actions that are easy to do--and also easy not to do...The slight edge is always at work, either for you or against you.
• The secret of genius appears to lie not in our genes, but in our memes--those patterns of thought, habit, and emotion woven into our minds by the people and events around us.
• Our instinct for group survival is a powerful force that drives us to look past our narrow self-interest.