“We think we are creating the system, but the system is also creating us. We build the system, we live in its midst, and we are changed.”— Ellen Ullman, amazon.com
“We think we are creating the system for our own purposes. We believe we are making it in our own image. We call the microprocessor the “brain”; we say the machine has “memory.” But the computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very slim part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic,…”— Ellen Ullman, amazon.com
“Posts are heterogeneous in form (video, images, audio, text) and consists of semi-structured data (e.g. a textual post has a title and a body, but the actual textual content is un-structured). Luckily enough, our users do a great job at summarizing the content of their posts with tags. As the distri…”— Tumblr Engineering, engineering.tumblr.com
“That's the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don't care, individuals do.”— Mark Twain, amazon.com
“Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race—the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress yo…”— Mark Twain, amazon.com
“The time lags imposed by stocks allow room to maneuver, to experiment, and to revise policies that aren't working.”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“The elements, the parts of systems we are most likely to notice, are often (not always) least important in defining the unique characteristics of the system—unless changing an element also results in changing relationships or purpose.”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“A system generally goes on being itself, changing only slowly if at all, even with complete substitutions of its elements—as long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact.”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“Changing [a system's] elements usually has the least effect on the system.”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“...one of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants.”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“If a frog turns right and catches a fly, and then turns left and catches a fly, and then turns around backward and catches a fly, the purpose of the frog has to do not with turning left or right or backward but with catching flies. If a government proclaims its interest in protecting the environment…”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“Many interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information.”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own?”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“You think that because you understand 'one' that you must therefore understand 'two' because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 'and.'”— Sufi teaching story, amazon.com
“A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“You can be doing something that has always worked and suddenly discover, to your great disappointment, that your action no longer works.”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“The system, to a large extent, causes it's own behavior. An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com
“A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of it…”— Donella H. Meadows, amazon.com