Book Excerpts – webmindset

Digital school, future of schools in the digital age

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 05:22:24 +0000

Book Title: Smarter Than You Think / How technology is changing our minds for better

Written by: Clive Thompson

Chapter Title: Digital Schools

Book summary and further information: Smarter than you think

Short reports and stories compiled into a chapter

Clive Thompson, in his interview with mindfulness, criticizes and belittles analysts as persons who leave the facts behind and just speculate about future. But in many parts of his book, he also takes up the analyst role and talks about the technology in the same way as the analysts he criticises.

The chapter on the digital school is an exception. This time it seems he not sure to judge the current state or predict the future trend. This chapter is merely a compilation of some facts and stories, with a positive and optimistic narrative, of course.

Smarter Than You Think - Digital School

[Inverted classes]

… Other teachers are even more aggressive about inverting their classes: They assign videos to be watched at home, then have the students do the homework in class, flipping their instruction inside out.

… A video can often be a better way to deliver a lecture-style lesson, because students can pause and rewind when they get confused – impossible with a live classroom lesson.

In contrast, homework is better done in a classroom, because that’s when you’re likely to need to ask the teacher for extra help.

The classroom hasn’t changed much over the years. Over the centuries actually.

… As various educational analysts have joked, if you brought a bunch of surgeons from a hundred years ago, into today’s hospitals, they would have no idea what was going on, because everything about their craft had evolved: antibiotics, laparoscopic devices, MRIs,

But time-traveling teachers would have no trouble walking into an elementary school (or even Harvard) and going to work, because schools are nearly identical. Walk to the front of the class, pick up the chalk, and start lecturing.

[On the importance of tracking student’s progress]

Khan’s videos are the most prominent part of the system.

But they’re also the least innovative one.

They’re still pretty much just traditional lessons and lectures, albeit ones that can be consulted and re-consulted worldwide, at any time.

What’s new is how teachers use the Khan Academy to track progress.

Composing essays is meaningless.

Teachers are an inauthentic audience. They aren’t necessarily interested in what their students have to say; they’re just reading as a part of their jobs. A writer is being forced to write for an audience that’s being forced to read.

Further readings:

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Digital school, future of schools in the digital age appeared first on webmindset.

Ambient awareness, definition and quotes from Clive Thompson

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 15:02:16 +0000

Book Title: Smarter Than You Think / How technology is changing our minds for better

Written by: Clive Thompson

Chapter Title: Ambient Awareness

Book summary and further information: Smarter than you think

A chapter with an optimistic view on the cluttered-communication era

In this chapter, Clive Thompson tries to devaluate negative judgments about the new style of communication. A communication which is based on tiny bits of information embedded in tweets or Instagram captions or other social media status updates.

Quoting Kranzberg, he says, “Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is neutral.” Thus each tool needs to be carefully scrutinized on its own merits.

Smarter Than You Think - Ambient Awareness

Definition of ambient awareness

[Ambient awareness is kind of ESP (Extrasensory Perception).]

Social scientists have a phrase for this type of ESP: “ambient awareness.”

Ambient awareness is, they say, almost like being in the same room as someone and picking up on his mood and thoughts by the stray signals he gives off.

You create a picture of someone else’s internal state gradually, almost unconsciously, by assembling many small observations.

How the total image emerges from tiny bit of social information

Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist, first noticed this effect more than ten years ago while studying text messaging in Japan.

Ito talked to young Japanese couples, all of whom lived in separate apartments (and in one case, separate cities).

She found that the couples who trade short messages all day and night to establish a sense of connection.

They’d ping each other with tidbits like “I guess I’ll take a bath now,” “Just bought a pair of shoes,” or “The episode today sucked today, didn’t it?”

One young businessman jokingly described his text messages to his girlfriend as “mutterings” and the responses he got as “mutterings in reply.”

This is the paradox of status updates.

Each little update – each individual bit of social information – is, on its own, pretty insignificant, even mundane.

But taken together over time, the snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friend’s inner lives.

… “It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a partner architect at Microsoft, tells me. “No message is the single-most-important message.”

Further readings:

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Ambient awareness, definition and quotes from Clive Thompson appeared first on webmindset.

The new literacies brought about by technology

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 17:33:39 +0000

Book Title: Smarter Than You Think / How technology is changing our minds for better

Written by: Clive Thompson

Chapter Title: The New Literecies

Book summary and further information: Smarter than you think

A few notes before reading

The fourth chapter of Thompson’s book, compared to the previous chapters, will not satisfy the reader.

If you are not convinced with Chris Anderson’s endorsement of the author, which notes his storytelling skill, this chapter will convince you about Anderson’s description.

The chapter starts will a fun, instructive and not-so-heard story about gerrymandering. Sure you will like it. But it will not be easy to relate this crowd-sourcing example to the rest of the chapter.

Literacy – in this chapter – is mostly about the photo and video literacy. With many stories that can be omitted without loss of meaning or continuity.

This part of the book could be more enjoyable if the title was not so broad, or at least the topic was discussed more in depth throughout the chapter.

Smarter Than You Think - New literacies

Traditionally, “literacy” has primarily meant two things: being able to read and being able to write.

That’s still true, and it will remain true for a long time, because the written word remains an exquisitely flexible tool for formalizing and manipulating knowledge.

Computational power isn’t just changing the old literacies of reading and writing.

It’s creating new ones. This includes literacies in video, images, and data sets, forms of information that are becoming newly plastic.

A decade’s worth of e-mail, text messages, photos, and health information can provide fascinating glimpses into hidden contours of your life, if you’re able to seek patterns in the noise.

Will everybody actually want to develop data literacy? Probably not, just as not everyone wants to develop their skill at writing or pencil drawing.

Still, the number of people who already find data visualization enjoyable in surprising.

Tools for though often are most powerful when they become second nature, thus somewhat invisible.

Writing transforms thinking only after the post where you no longer have to struggle with the act of writing itself.

“Filtering, and otherwise bending visual light to our creative tendencies, has been part of the professional photography since the beginning,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom tells me in an e-mail.

“All Instragram did was take the creative tools that the pros have been using and put them in the hands of the masses.”

For years, commercial journalism struggled with the problems of using one mode to talk about everything.

If you started a TV-station, you had to tell every story with the moving images, even when it clearly wasn’t suited for slow-moving, nonvisual issues.

If you started a radio station, you had to tell every story with sound, even when that was less useful…

And if you had a newspaper, you used text and photos for everything, even when the didn’t work very well…

But these silos break down in digital environments, where any news organization can deploy any tool.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post The new literacies brought about by technology appeared first on webmindset.

Remixing: Everything is a remix

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 07:58:47 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Number: 8

Chapter Title: Remixing

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 8: Remixing

All new technologies derive from a combination of existing technologies. (Quoted from Brian Arthur).

With the coming new tools, we’ll be able to create our visions on demand.

It will take only a few seconds to generate a believable image of a turquoise rose, glistening with dew, poised in a trim golden vase – perhaps even faster than we could write these words. And that is just the opening scene.

At the same time, the cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, YouTube Capture, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images and upsetting a great asymmetry that has been inherent in all media.

We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth, a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal.

The handcrafted Hollywood film is a rare tiger. It won’t go away, but if you want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming critters below – the jungle of YouTube, indie films, TV serials, documentaries, commercials, infomercials, and insect-scale supercuts and mashups – and not just the tiny apex of tigers.

If Hollywood is at the apex of the pyramid, the bottom is where the swampy action is, and where the future of the moving images begins.

If the text literacy meant being able to parse and manipulate texts, then the new media fluency means being able to parse and manipulate moving images with the same ease.

… the first visual literacy tools are already emerging in research labs.

The ability to scroll back to the beginning and hear music again – that exact performance – changed music forever.

Songs became shorter on average, and more melodic and repeatable.

In 30 years the most important cultural works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed the most.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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Digital Socialism: Towards a New Socialism

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 12:35:14 +0000

From my point of view, among all of the 12 chapters of #the inevitable, none of them are as inspiring and enlightening as chapter 6.

Kevin Kelly has titled this chapter as ‘Sharing,’ one of the twelve forces that he believes are shaping our future. Others are accessing, immediacy, screening, and flowing to name a few.

Although he used the word ‘Sharing‘ as title, soon we learn that he prefers to use the word socialism.

Sure he knows that the word ‘socialism’ has a negative connotation for most of his readers, as he notes:

I recognize that the word “socialism” is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms “communal”, “communitarian”, and “collective”.

I use “socialism” because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely on social interactions for their power.

We call social media “social” for this sames reason: it is a species of social action.

But going through the chapter, you feel that “socialism” was the best name for the trend he is trying to describe.

If previous chapters, he already called The Internet a large copying machine. Here, he emphasizes again that sharing and sampling content is the new default.

He describes Tor, as an example, a place “where one can find a copy of almost anything that can be copied”.

Bottom-up socialism is not bitter as its old top-down version

This free access to resources helped people to move toward a bottom-up socialism.

This is one of the critical differences Kelly highlights between new digital socialism and its old classic not-so-loved top-down counterpart:

The top-down socialism of the industrial era could not keep up with the rapid adaptations, constant innovations, and self-generating energy that democratic free markets offered.

But still, there’s no reason to call the new paradigm something other than digital socialism:

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds.

Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops.

Instead of sharing picks and shovels, we share scripts and APIs.

Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritrocracies where the only thing that matters is getting things done.

Instead of national production, we have peer production.

Instead of free government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free commercial goods and services.

Kelly notices many changes in the market and ownership structure. We are not eager for product ownership anymore. We are happy with access to products and services. Netflix and Spotify are the best samples of the new value system.

The main differentiating aspect of the digital socialism

Besides all similarities that Kelly describes, there’s a critical differentiating factor we have to consider, to have a more balanced view of this digital socialism:

It’s not an ideology, not an “ism.” It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation.

It’s a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.

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Accessing: The substitute for ownership

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 19:26:05 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Number: 5

Chapter Title: Accessing

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 5: Accessing

A reporter for TechCrunch recently observed, “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.”

Digital media exhibits a similar absence.

Netflix, the world’s largest video hub, allows me to watch a movie without owning it.

Spotify, the largest music streaming company, lets me listen to whatever music I want without owning any of it.

Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited enables me to read any book in its 800000-volume library without owning books.

Every year I own less of what I use.

Possession is not as important as it once was.

Access is superior to ownership in many ways that it is driving the frontiers of the economy.

On average most modern products have undergone dematerialization. Since 1970s, the weight of the average automobile has fallen by 25 percent.

Appliances tend to weigh less per function.

Of course, communication technology shows the clearest dematerialization.

Digital technology accelerates dematerialization by hastening migration from the products to services.

… In Silicon Valley the say it like this: Software eats everything.

… I predict that by 2025 the bandwidth to a high-end driverless car will exceed the bandwidth into your home.

The more we embed intelligence and smarts into the objects in our households and offices, the more we will treat these articles as social property.

To access a service, a customer is often committing to it in a far stronger way than when he or she purchases an item.

… Access mode brings consumers closer to the producers, and in fact, the consumer often acts as the producer.

The first stand-alone product to be “servicized” was software.

Today, selling software as service (SaS) instead of product has become the default mode for almost all software.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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Screening: The substitute for reading

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sat, 15 Jul 2017 06:23:23 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Number: 4

Chapter Title: Screening

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 4: Screening

In ancient times culture evolved around spoken word.

… We were people of the Word. Then about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology.

… From printing came journalism, science, libraries, and law. Printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a string of sentences), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact), and allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.

[Because of availability and low cost of technology,] authors did not have to compose scholarly tomes only, but could “waste” inexpensively printed books on heart-rending love stories, or publish memoirs even if they were not kings.

That’s nearly one new screen each year for any human on earth.

We will start putting watchable screens on any flat surface.

We are now People of the Screen.

This has set up the current culture clash between People of the Book and People of the Screen.

… People of the Screen tend to ignore the classic logic of books or the reverence for copies; they prefer the dynamic flux of pixels.

Screen culture is a world of constant flux, of endless sound bites, quick cuts, and half-baked ideas.

[In the screen age,] truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves.

People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth.

[Although screens prevail our world,] if we count the creation of all words on all screens, you are writing far more per week than your grandmother, no matter where you live.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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Flowing – Excerpts from “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (3)

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 19:36:56 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Title: Flowing

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 3: Flowing

The internet is the world’s largest copying machine… Tech companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying.

If something can be copied, it will be copied.

Formerly solid products made of steel and leather are now sold as fluid services that keep updating.

The initial age of computing was borrowed from the industrial age. As Marshall McLuhan observed, the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces.

The first commercial computers employed the metaphor of the office. Our screens had a “desktop” and “folders” and “files”… The second digital age overturned the office metaphor and brought us the organizing principle of the web. The basic unit was no longer files but “pages”.

…Now we are transitioning into the third age of computation. Pages and browsers are far less important. Today the prime units are flows and streams.

We subscribe to the channels… We are bathed in streams of notifications and updates. Tags have replaced links…

Some streams like Snapchat operate totally in the present, with no past or future…

If you see something, fine. Then it is gone.

Free is hard to ignore. It propels duplication at a scale that would previously have been unbelievable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied?

Trust, for instance.

Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. You can’t purchase trust wholesale. You can’t download trust and store it in a database. You can’t simply duplicate someone’s else’s trust.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Flowing – Excerpts from “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (3) appeared first on webmindset.

The Lean Startup | Book Review & Summary

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 07:31:39 +0000

General information about the book

Title: The Lean Startup

Explanatory Title: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Publisher: Currency (Crown Publishing Group)

First Publication: 2011

ISBN / Pages: 978-0307887894 / 336 pages

Category: Entrepreneurship / Starting a new business / Startups

About the Lean Startup author | Eric Ries

Eric Ries, born in 1978, is a Yale graduate mostly known because of his now classic book “The Lean Startup.” The content of this book is mainly based on online posts he published earlier on his blog, Startup Lessons Learned.

Ries started his career journey as a programmer. After a few failures in various startups, IMVU was the first business that got real traction and received investment. Co-founded in 2004, IMVU remained in the market even till now. However, Ries stepped down from operational positions in 2008 and remained a board member. Most of what Ries has written in his books and preaches today as the lean method has roots in these successes and failures.

Over a decade, with the help of other friends, authors, and like-minded people, he has fine-tuned and furthered his Lean Philosophy or Lean Methodology model. Nowadays, many people worldwide believe that lean thinking, as a flexible and agile process, is a reliable model for leading startups through the path of success and growth.

Ries says that he has decided to devote himself full-time to the Lean Startup movement, the term he frequently uses to show his ideas’ vast, significant, and sustained effect.

The lean mindset

As Ries mentions several times in his book, the idea of The Lean Startup is inspired by lean thinking in Japan’s automotive industry, especially Toyota Manufacturing System. Lean thinking, in his words, means looking for value-creating processes and trying to eliminate waste.

But thinking lean in the startup world is much more complicated than in the automotive and other physical industries. It’s easier to find waste in a factory or most traditional businesses. But when you run a startup, you explore the uncharted waters of uncertainty.

My definition of a startup:

A human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.Eric Ries

This is the reason that he tries to integrate scientific thinking under the label of validated learning into his lean startup model. It should be noted that scientific thinking is much broader than what he refers to. And what he describes as scientific thinking is just an essential subset of the scientific paradigm: insisting on the importance of experiments.

Lean Startup meaning

Considering the above description, the Lean Startup is a method for developing a business or product using experimentation and iteration (Or, as Eric Ries calls it: The Build-measure-learn feedback loop). It’s based on learning and feedback instead of pre-planning, correction instead of perfection, and data instead of prediction.

Validated learning

In traditional businesses, with a known and stable environment, it’s easy to set a vision and define some milestones on the way. But startups are supposed to be operated in uncertainty. Otherwise, they won’t be called startupDefininging time-based milestones and allocating phase-based budgets are not meaningful and effective in such a situation.

Startups often accidentally build something that nobody wants. It doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget.Eric Ries

Here’s one of the lean startup principles: Each case of validated learning should be considered as an achieved milestone on the way forward. Validated learning is so essential in the lean mindset that Ries literally equates it to the startup’s raison d’etre:

Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.Eric Ries

How the Lean Startup methodology differs from the traditional approach

The traditional approach to founding and developing a startup was akin to the classic entrepreneurship roadmap:

Writing a detailed business plan (even if you are sure that you can’t stick to it)
Making financial projections (even if you know that everything is uncertain)
Designing and creating the perfect product in secret before making a full-force launch

In the traditional approach, in the early stages, the entrepreneur and business know everything about the product, and the market knows nothing about it. But in the so-called lean startup methodology, the business and the market are discovering (or somehow co-creating) the perfect product together in a never-ending path of experimentation and learning.

Selected sentences from the book

My definition of sta artup:

A human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.Eric Ries

Modern management and technology have created more productive capacity than firms know what to do with.Eric Ries

Unfortunately, too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket than drive a car. They prescribe the steps to take and the results to expect in excruciating detail, and as in planning to launch a rocket, they are set up in such a way that even tiny errors in assumptions can lead to catastrophic outcomes.Eric Ries

This book may not be suitable for you if…

Although Eric Ries believes that the application of lean startup ideas is not limited to startups, his book is heavily oriented towards online and digital businesses or at least businesses with a serious software core.

Therefore, if you are not running such a business, you can find similar or more valuable ideas in the books classified under the design thinking category. Or in other words, if you are already familiar with design thinking principles, The Lean Startup will not have too much to teach you.

The Lean Startup Summary

There are many different summarized versions of The Lean Startup on the web. Kim Hartman’s summary is one the most accurate and useful summaries accessible for free. As this file is about 30 pages long, it’s more than a summary, and it could be called a synopsis of the lean startup.

You can download a PDF version of the summary either from his website or the link below (also available in ePub format):

The Lean Startup Summary (PDF)

The Lean Startup Summary (ePub)

Selected book reviews

10 Years Since ‘The Lean Startup’ (Forbes | Ryan Gray)

Book Review: The Lean Startup (Financial Times | Philip Delves Broughton)

Links for buying the book

The Lean Startup (Paperback) – Amazon

The Lean Startup (Audiobook) – Audible

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Cognifying – Excerpts from “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (2)

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 15:43:37 +0000

Book Title: The Inevitable (Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future)

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Title: Cognifying

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Chapter 2: Cognifying

[Cognification will be one of the major forces that shape our future]

There’s nothing as consequential as a dumb thing made smarter.

[We believed that] AI would be a bounded entity. We would know where our thoughts ended and theirs began.

However, the first genuine AI will not be birthed in a stand-alone supercomputer, but in a superorganism of a billion computer chips known as the net… Stand-alone synthetic minds are likely to be viewed as handicapped…

When this emerging AI arrives, its very ubiquity will hide it.

We’ll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, but it will be faceless, unseen.

We will be able to reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is.

[Describing IBM’s Watson program]

Like many parents of a bright mind, IBM would like Watson to pursue a medical career, so it should come as no surprise that the primary application under development is a medical diagnosis tool.

At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.

The AI on the horizon looks… almost invisible except when it blinks off.

This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need.

You simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity. It will enliven your inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century past.

Now everything that we formerly electrified we will cognify.

Quotes and excerpts from other parts of the book

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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